My trouble is that I don't enjoy fiddling about with computers and CD drives and USB cables and all that to get to read a book. I am not that organized and while I like to bring reading materials when I travel to spend an hour or what ever the night before fiddling about to get content onto this or that device just isn't going to happen.
Then there is the battery problem. It is a 12 hour bus or train ride from here to Toronto and when I go on to Houston or Lufkin or London it can be a lot more. Things like the Victor Reader don't have anything like the battery life required. Mostly here in Canada we don't have access to Bookshare so, back to copying CD's I get from CNIB from computer to the Victor Stream there isn't much benefit not already available on my cell phone. Not sure about what processes would be necessary to read Audible.com content. A mainstream device is therefore appealing. If only all these services would learn from history and get their sh*t together to standardize content and format. The success of the printing press depends precisely on the use of a standard code. Admittedly there are a variety of languages and I suppose a variety of fonts but if each book was written in a unique alphabet reading would be a lot less popular and no single publishing house would sell much. Beta - VHS wars all over again. ----- Original Message ----- From: Tom Fowle To: [email protected] Sent: Saturday, March 07, 2009 12:24 PM Subject: Re: [BlindHandyMan] Kindle 2 petition Dale, You have a point there, yes Kindle does use several proprietary formats and will have access to materials before they get to one of the bat systems. And yes there is that silly worry about synthetic speech taking market from audio books. Being cheap, I would rarely pay for books I can get free, but neither would I scream very loudly if I had to pay for something I really wanted, in the perhaps naive belief that authors would actually get a part of the price. <GRIN> but I'd only pay for books if the accessibility were really great, not just O.K. Oops, where does that leave BookShare which I use all the time regardless of the pretty high error rate. Nothing is black and white or simple. I wouldn't hold my breath about Kindle accessibility. Tom [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
