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At present, very few of us buy books in any form. If we could have e-books read aloud to us, however, we would happily pay for them. We are an untapped market consisting of some 15 million people to which authors and publishers have never before had direct access. For this reason, the position of the Authors Guild is not only morally repugnant but also bad business. Prohibiting the blind and others from reading commercially available e-books just means that authors and publishers won't get our money. The guild's position hurts both authors and people with print disabilities. In an age when how we get information is constantly and rapidly changing, it's important that people with disabilities have access to it in the same way that it is important for us to have access to physical structures, goods and services. Amazon took an important step in the right direction by including a read-aloud feature on the Kindle 2, but the Authors Guild is now trying to set us back. We are not going to allow them to stand in the doorway of the virtual bookstore to keep us out.

GIMP is the favorite graphics editing program of many designers and graphic artists. It is free and compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux (the two big reasons for its popularity). It has a wide array of features, as well as plug-ins, filters and brushes. Documentation is primarily available in online communities, as well as through extensive add-ons

There are plenty of remarkable open-source applications on the way this year. Quite a few projects are quietly (or not so quietly) working on major releases or significant upgrades that they aim to make available sometime during 2009. Computerworld have rounded up 25 of the most notable here.

A coalition of organizations representing people who cannot read print will protest the removal of the text-to-speech function from e-books for the Amazon Kindle 2 at the Authors Guild headquarters in NY City at 31 East 32nd Street on April 7, 2009, 12 to 2:00 p.m. Join us there! Manon

As some of you may already know, this week we received a DMCA take-down notice from Amazon requesting the removal of the tool kindlepid.py and instructions associated with it. Although we never hosted this tool (contrary to their claim), nor believe that this tool is used to remove technological measures (contrary to their claim), we decided, due to the vagueness of the DMCA law and our intention to remain in good relation with Amazon, to voluntarily follow their request and remove links and detailed instructions related to it.

Publishers and authors now have the power to silence the Kindle 2 e-book reader. Amazon.com Inc. reversed course Friday on the device's controversial text-to-speech feature, which reads digital books aloud in a robotic voice. The company gave rights holders the ability to disable the feature for individual titles.

Unless Amazon embraces open standards, the Kindle's lead will become a very short story.

This course provides an overview of the historical and modern context and operation of free and open source software (FOSS) communities and associated software projects. The practical objective of the course is to teach students how they can begin to participate in a FOSS project in order to contribute to and improve aspects of the software that they feel are wrong. Students will learn some important FOSS tools and techniques for contributing to projects and how to set up their own FOSS projects.

Good series of tertiary lectures.

Sequel Pro is a fast, easy-to-use Mac database management application for working with MySQL databases. Sequel Pro gives you direct access to your MySQL databases on local and remote servers.

"The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK registered charity (Registration Number 1129409) which exists to promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level, and to put the fun back into learning computing. We plan to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost computer, for use in teaching computer programming to children. We expect this computer to have many other applications both in the developed and the developing world."

We recently posted a article entitled, Switching from Microsoft Office to Openoffice.org. We hope by now you have downloaded this great free office suite and that the migration went smoothly. The following article will further help you migrate, but this time concentrating only on the similarities between Microsoft Word and Openoffice.org Writer. These similarities are divided into basics, mid-level and advanced tasks.

"DICE aims at providing support to teaching and non-teaching staff of Swiss higher education institutions in copyright management of digital content for eLearning. The goal of DICE is: (a) Increasing awareness of copyright issues related with digital content, in order to provide sound knowledge and eliminate unreasonable fears. (b) Developing fundamental skills in intellectual property and copyright management for higher education staff (e.g. understanding basic rules applicable in Switzerland, using Creative Commons licenses, etc.) (c) Increase the readiness and ability of authors to publishing open access resources (aka Open Educational Resources)"

This initiative originated in the Fellowship of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). The coordinators of this initiative are Hannes Hauswedell and Jan-Hendrik Peters

Special care should be taken to protect highly effective schools for low-income minority students during district upheaval and budget cuts. We should treat highly effective teachers in areas of need as the stars that they are. But the places of learning in the community need to step up to the plate.

Lots of info about copyright legislation, creative commons etc