Butterfly In the Sky

Hiya, readers! For those of you who can go twice as high, you likely took a look and it's in a book.

Alas, the only colors in our rainbow of literacy are Prison Blue and Confinement Orange.

Let's take a quick peek at what Securus offers we incarcerated many as reading material here.

A preface, a prelude, and perhaps, a pondering.

Here in prison, we have free time to read, when we're not in programming of some sort. When I have free time, I try to get books out of my dorm's mini-library, whose books are contributed by other inmates. Alas, these books are only available once per week for an hour, count depending.
Here, we enjoy literature as a pastime, a peaceable pusher of clock hands and calendar days.
Our compound's general library is hard to get to, and very small -- an afterthought, instead of a place of importance, sharing its place with an equally tiny law library.

Enter Securus, an Aventiv company.

Why, hello!
We have these handy dandy electronic tablet devices running a fork of AOSP that is modified for security. Onboard, there is an eBook reader, probably Librera, which has a feature labeled as Catalogs. We have one catalog, the Securus eBook Library, which features free eBooks.

This sounds great in theory, but let's look at the execution.

Peek Inside!

The books we have access to are, on average, cribbed directly from Project Gutenberg, but not kept in any reasonable semblance of update.
As so, we largely are given short stories from the 1960s or earlier, or full books that date in the 1800s. There are, of course, exceptions to this, with names like Cory Doctorow and Ann Wilson interspersed with relatively recent fare written, licensed with Creative Commons.
We appear to have 24,229 different titles potentially available to us.

O, frabjous day, 'tis not, however.

The headaches.

The books are poorly indexed, largely difficult to search, and frequently turn up an error that the book isn't available, try again later.
I've tried for months, mind you, with no change.
To search Cory Doctorow, as example, you can't use his first and last name; rather, you can search by last name, get lots of unrelated results, but buried in the middle, there's Craphound, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe, and a few others.

What can be done?

I get, and I gladly accept, that authors would like to be paid for their works. I bought my ebooks on the outside through a few venues, like Smashwords, Amazon (for authors who only published their eBooks there), and a few titles through Humble Bundle.
Securus is content to rent to us movie titles, but won't give us a book store in which we could purchase eBooks.

My solution is multi-pronged. It looks a bit like this:

• Grab a newer swath of books through Project Gutenberg and other open, free sources, making more content available at no cost to the masses.

This should include educational material, like software development, horticultural information, how-to manuals for modern life, modern basics on medicines, diseases, and the human body, as examples. The eBooks should also include images, for those who need to see a picture of how something works.

• Add new books that require a payment to electronically own, and keep the payments reasonable for us who rely on the outside to acquire funds.

It's something like adding an eBook store as counterpoint to adding all these movies we can rent. Those of us who rely more on written content than we do spoken content are amazingly left out of the running on hardware that could easily have been used to give us that level of accessibility. In my case, I own very little music, and a handful of games I can play without my ears, but try to read frequently.

• Develop partnerships with public libraries that offer electronic lending, allowing inmates who are interested to pay a reasonable fee to access this.

I would be willing to spend a few dollars each month to be able to check out 2-3 eBooks at a time, with the funds going to these public libraries to help them afford licenses for more eBooks. It may require additional software, like Libby/Overdrive or Hoopla, but given that none of these apps give us a public channel to communicate to the free world, should require minimal to no modification for security's sake.

The only concern in this case is that public libraries do offer books that may run contrary to a legitimate security interest (i.e. the books may describe how to make weapons or incendiary devices), so this option would be the hardest to accept.

• Install and make available a few good free font sets, including OpenDyslexic, for use in the eBooks app.

I don't need it, but what about accessibility for those with Dyslexia, or need fonts that are easy on the eyes for extended reading? Given that OpenDyslexic was free for use, and should be easy for them to push to our tablets, getting that on board should be near-trivial. A few good serifed fonts similar to Georgia would be appreciated, as well.

I caaaan't do anythiiiiing!

But I would take a look, if it's in an eBook. There are so many things that could be done to give us things to peaceably pass our time between classes. After all, we go through several daytime and nighttime counts -- 1/6th of our day is spent in our cells -- so might as well read then!

Alas, I can but cast this wish across the wires and encourage you, especially in Florida, to push your people in power to make this reality.

Take care of yourselves, of each other, and live for peace.

👋🏾