The iPad can be great for letting people read, but it can be just as good for letting certain people speak. As I’ve previously mentioned, autistic, nonverbal, and otherwise disabled people who have trouble talking can make use of AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) apps to say the words they can’t say for themselves. However, today I learned about a legal battle shaping up against a popular $299.99 AAC app for the iPad called Speak For Yourself. Dana Nieder, parent of a 4-year-old nonverbal child and extremely satisfied user of Speak For Yourself, posts to her blog that a pair of...

Here's a great article from Engage.  At the end of the article, Robert Newman, discusses which type of magazines he thinks will survive and which will die.  Newman is the creative director of Readers Digest and former creative director of Real Simple.  He's also design director of Fortune, Entertainment Weekly, Vibe, Details and New York. Lesson 1: Let It Read Newman: You want to design something that takes full advantage of the iPad’s capabilities. People like to read on iPads. So the first thing you have to do is make the reading experience really easy and really pleasurable....

jkOnTheRun has this comparison today.  He looks at iBooks, Kindle, Zinio, Comixology and Newsstand.  Barnes & Noble doesn't have a retina-enabled ereading app yet. Here's what he has to say about Comixology; The iPad really got me back into reading comics, and Comixology quickly became my go-to source for digital comics. The new iPad really makes this a fantastic reading experience. With older iPads, the text would be fuzzy enough to force me to use the pane-by-pane view. With the new iPad, I don’t need to. While the issues look great as they are, Comixology is stepping up their game by updating (for free)...

The Mac Observer has a review by John Martellaro.  He really likes the free product: If you’re only interested in Apple’s iBooks and Amazon’s Kindle reader for the iPad, you can do a lot. But if you want an alternative e-book reader from a third party and want to focus on books in EPUB or PDF format, generally without DRM, the Bluefire reader is an excellent alternative. Some people like to collect Twitter clients. Some have lots of different writing tools. Sometimes people just feel better when they have a choice. Moreover, sometimes there are subtle differences between feature sets, and customers like...

According to the App Store the updates are: New library design - view your content in a new, updated look and feel.  iPhone users can now choose view [sic] their library in grid view. Cloud view - easily access all of your content in the coud in a simple, combined view Optimized for the new iPad retina display I'm glad its been retina-optimized because my iPad 3 should arrive tomorrow.  Look for some comparison pictures with my iPad 2.  ...

Well, I actually was able to connect to the Apple servers and order an iPad 3.  Delivery is supposed to be on March 16.  When I get it I will post some comparison pictures of ebook text with the Kindle app - comparing the clarity of the text in iPad versions 2 and 3.  I'll also put it under my microscope and give you some real close-up shots of what's going on with the new Retina display. I ordered the 32G, Verizon LTE version.  Why?  For a couple of reasons.  Currently I have the 16G iPad 2 and I'm running out...

That's the result shown in an excellent graphic in the Mercury News.  It's part of an article called Will Apple create the all-iPad classroom? According to the graphic, for 32 students over a period of 6 years, the cost of an iPad textbook will run $36,000.  This includes the initial cost of the iPad and replacement costs during the 6 year period.  By way of contrast, the cost of a regular textbook over that period will be $11,328, including replacement costs.  That's a big difference! The article goes on to say: Many schools are forging ahead with iPads, even without the iBook...

From a report in FierceWireless about Forrester Reasearch's latest: According to the research firm's report, Apple still controls 73 percent of the tablet market, and other OEMs are struggling to catch up through improvements in services. Forrester found that Samsung has a 5 percent market share, Motorola Mobility (NYSE:MMI) has 4 percent and Acer a 3 percent share. Interestingly though, the Android tablets that have made the biggest inroads so far are Amazon's Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble's Nook line, mainly because of what they bring consumers in terms of value-added services. "Forrester's data shows that the top reason consumers don't...

From the International Business Times: The Apple iPad 3 is poised to sweep the tablet market and steal more than 50% of the Amazon Kindle Fire's customers, according to a new study. The study by the deal-shopping site TechBargains.com found that nearly half of the potential Apple iPad 3 buyers it surveyed plan to purchase the new tablet when after its release, which is reportedly set to take place on March 7. But even more surprising was the study's finding that more than 50 percent of the Amazon Kindle Fire's customers also plan to buy the iPad 3. The trend could have a major impact...

The Air Force’s plan to use iPads as electronic flight bags in cargo planes, which I mentioned here, has hit a snag, and the Air Force has canceled an order for 2,861 iPad 2 devices. (The original story involved the Air Force purchasing 18,000 iPads. NextGov’s doesn’t have any word about what’s going to happen to the other 15,000. Perhaps the 2,861 was just the first order, so the others have been canceled as well.) It turns out that someone remembered that PDF reader GoodReader, which was going to be used as part of the package, was developed...

That's the title of a most interesting article in ReadWriteWeb.  Written by someone in the trenches.  Here's an excerpt: If you were to visit the library on the campus where I teach, you would see students waiting to use outdated desktops in the computer labs and library, particularly around midterms and finals week. It seems odd at first, considering the school has a laptop requirement for all undergraduates. That means you have to have a laptop computer when you enroll, and presumably, as an instructor, I can require my students to bring them to any class. But here's the reality: laptops break,...

While not exactly news, it’s fun to look at a conversion-of-an-e-reader-skeptic story every now and then. Here’s one from Florida International University Medical Library Digital Access Librarian Bohyun Kim. Despite the digital nature of Kim’s job title, she had never really been tempted to get an e-ink e-reader device—mainly because she already had an iPad. But when she checked out a Kindle loaded with e-books from the university lending library, she found she enjoyed the experience more than she expected. And although the lighter weight and less eyestrain-inducing screen were nice, what she really liked was the way there...