First, Kindle books cost money. I live in Chicago and my city government buys more than 100,000 print books a year for the public library system. One of the taxpayer-funded universities in my state, the University of Illinois, has more than 14 million books. It is bigger than the libraries of Yale, Princeton and the University of Chicago. I can order nearly all of these books from my local library and read them for free. If I had to pay for them, I would not be able to access the knowledge I could because of the cost. Blind people need access to vast libraries at little or no cost like sighted people do. Older books and those of a scientific or specialized nature will never make it to kindle. They will need to be scanned and offered to the blind in an electronic format. Kindle only allows a computer to select a few words of text so note taking from a Kindle book is tedious.
I have listened to a few audio books produced buy Audible. The library for the blind program here in America began incorporating commercial audio books into its program a few years ago. These include Audible books. The readers are not as good as those from the library for the blind or from the major book publishers. Audible seems to use second tier voice talent who have quirky voices. The reader of one book was emotionless and did not connect with the material. Also, Audible often does not read books on regional history, regional non-fiction or those of extremely controversial topics. The national library service records audio books that fill in these gaps. When cross-border sharing of accessible books becomes available later this year, people will have more books than they could possibly read so many of these commercial services will seem superfluous. Kelly On 3/20/19, Dane Trethowan <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > I have a question for the list. > > With the advent of such services as Kindle and Audible along with quite a > few others do list members think that Daisy will die or will their even be > a > need for Daisy in the not to distant future. > > With my Echo Show paired to my Braille Display I now read a huge amount of > content from Kindle though I can have the Show read this out using the > built-in TTS. > > I'm also a great fan of Audible, I've had an Audbile account for years but > haven't used it very much until recently. > > Again the Echo Show will handle Audible quite nicely though I do tend to > listen to Audible content through my Samsung phone which has incredibly > good > sound particularly for spoken workd material or perhaps Audible is doing a > little optimisation somewhere in the audio chain <smile>. > > I don't have a particular view on the question I asked above, I'm just > curious as to what other viewpoints are on this topic. > > > > > > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#2135): https://groups.io/g/all-audio/message/2135 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/30523608/21656 Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/all-audio/leave/1074140/405281159/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
