Another Kindle Related Lawsuit

We all remember a few months ago Discovery Channel’s parent company filed a lawsuit against Amazon Kindle for infringing on a patent that was owned by it. Authors Guild also put some pressure on Amazon to remove Read-2-Me from Amazon Kindle 2. The latest lawsuit involves National Federation of the Blind (NFB) and the American Council of the Blind (ACB) suing Arizona State University for using Kindle to distribute book on discrimination ground. Amazon Kindle does come with Read 2 Me which can read the books to folks with disability (which ironically was challenged by Authors Guild).

This is one of the issues that Amazon needs to address fast. You can’t expect someone who’s blind to be able to get her reading done on a Kindle without making it easier to manage the controls. I firmly believe that a voice-command capable Kindle can solve a lot of these issues. If Amazon wants universities to adopt Kindle as their main method of distributing books, it needs to make it possible for everyone to use Kindle. That would involve Amazon standing firm behind its Read-to-Me feature on Kindle while developing voice commands for the device (similar to what GPS devices offer these days). A voice-command capable Kindle shouldn’t be that much more expensive as the technology is pretty mainstream and used on all kinds of gadgets.

I am all for equal opportunity for all, and it’s truly unfair that a few people can’t get the experience of reading books on Kindle. The good news is, Amazon is in a position to do something about it, and my hunch is it probably will.