Here is a brief primer on Daisy books and the Mac which I hope will help.
A Daisy digital talking book is a new form of talking book which comes on digital media. These book can, depending on how they are produce, offer a wide range of navigational features such as navigation by headings or pages. There are many different kinds of Daisy books ranging all the way from simple recording of books transfered to digital media from and analog (tape) recording to fully navigable books such as the production of the Bible I did. Some may include the source text and other not. It is even possible to produce a Daisy DTB with no recordings in them at all which is what you get from Bookshare.org To make matters even more confusing there are two different versions of Daisy DTBs Daisy 2.02 and Daisy/NISO 2005. All Daisy playback devices will play Daisy 2.02 but not all will play Daisy/NISO 2005 books. Katieplayer and Victor Reader for MacOS will only read Daisy 2.02 books at this time. And they will only play books that have recordings not text only books. This is why I focus my efforts on making Daisy 2.02 books. Bookshare.org books are Daisy/NISO 2005 but they let you get an HTML copy to read if you don't have a Daisy playback software on your computer. Of course you will lose all the navigation in the book this way. You also must have a screen reader to read the text as Bookshare books are text only, no audio. My DTBmaker software will turn a Bookshare book into a full text, full audio Daisy 2.02 book if needed. A final wrinkle in all of this is that some producers, RFB&D for example, encrypt their books so you need special decryption keys to read them. Contact RFB&D for more information. Players As I said above there are many players some of which can read both types of Daisy books and some which can not.They are broken down into two classes hardware players and software players. Hardware players usually take CD-ROMs and most of them read both Daisy 2.02 and Daisy/NISO 2005 books. Only one that I know will read text only books and that is the Bookport from APH. It is a memory based player which turns your books into it's own special format for some odd reason. It requires special software which, until recently, was windows only. I understand there is a UNIX version of the transformation software which can be compiled under OS X and I am looking into building a GUI for it. Software player run a wide range from the free to quite expensive. Most only run under windows. Katieplayer and Victor Reader for MacOSX are the two for Mac. Neither will read Daisy/NISO 2005 or text only books (Bookshare) at this point. Hope this is of some help. Greg Kearney
