Hi Joe. If I may, I think personally that moving to text-only
content would be a mistake. I realise it's difficult for non-U.S.
residents to keep in mind, but services such as bookshare are not
available to all everywhere. Also, some organisations/libraries such
as, for instance, the RNIB over here in the UK do, as I understand
it, distribute a lot of content containing the human reader, i.e.,
natural audio. Were you to move away from supporting this kind of
content, you would preclude those users wishing to play this
material. I'm actually looking at doing some Daisy publishing
shortly. I own one of the software publishing tools for the PC, and
it's an ongoing project.
At 13:56 08/04/2006 -0400, Kafka's Daytime said:
Incidentally, I have a question for all on the list - or at least
those interested in DAISY. - regarding the forthcoming Cocoa version
of katieplayer. How would you feel if the new Cocoa version of
katieplayer were to support only Bookshare/DAISY 3 books and DAISY 2
content which does not use "live" Digital Rights Management (DRM)
(unless the standard is not obscure and is available to any developer
without draconian licensing fees/requirements)? RFBD books, for
instance, would - under this scenario - *not* be supported (though
we'd probably keep the legacy version of katieplayer available).
We're also considering moving away from the 'text + audio' flavor of
books and concentrating solely on 'text-only' (e.g. those books
provided by Bookshare). My own humble personal view is that it seems
less and less wise to distribute audio with a talking book. There is
the advantage of the human reader - but the prompt availability and
small file sizes of the 'text-only' books (rendered 'live' by
synthesized speech) - seems to me to trump the advantages one has in
the human-read audio. Further, Bookshare's content collection is
getting bigger and broader and I think we're going to see it continue
to grow (recent addition of the O'Reilly technical series was very
nice and kind of a big deal). (RFBD offers a fine service - I'm
simply wondering about the best way for us to proceed with
katieplayer based on the needs/wants of our audience). BTW, the
katieplayer Cocoa version would come in at the same $18 price point
for the BASIC version i.e. affordability is still a basic goal of the
effort. Finally, think of katieplayer in a broader, accessible media
player sense. No promises, but what would be in your feature wish
list? Again, would love to hear some thoughts from those who are
interested.
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