if any one does start a law sute count me in.
this is friggen rediculiss.
On 3/23/2012 5:30 PM, Eric Oyen wrote:
that has already happened. you can't play it out loud because they have already
declared it a public performance. even the protests in front of the American
Authors Guild HQ a couple of years back didn't even sway them. they did offer
to setup a registry of blind people that purchase from Amazon (and others) and
you would have to register and get a code before you could read the book.
what needs to happen is a class action against the guild. the class would be
composed of those who, for whatever reason, cannot read the printed word
(blind, dyslexic, etc.). if enough people were to join the class action, it is
fairly certain that both the publishing industry and the American Author's
Guild (a shill for the publishers) could be brought to task.
I do find it interesting that they use a visual only captcha on their site.
that, alone, suggests intent on their part to lock us out of our rights to
protest them.
I really wish I had the money, I would start a court case against them this
very next week.
-eric
On Mar 23, 2012, at 4:17 PM, Adie wrote:
Hi all
I first cane across this when I looked into the speech on the Kindle
itself, when it first came out with that function and couldn't believe
the attitude of the Authors' Guild. It seems to me, if you buy a book,
it shouldn't matter a damn whether you want to access the text by
looking at a screen, or having the screen read to you.
I went to the length of finding the Authors' Guild website and
constructing a polite, but furious, message to them, pointing out some
of the things already raised here and also that they would get a lot
of sales from blind people who might buy a book on the Kindle terms,
but probably wouldn't buy an audio book, mostly because of the cost. I
spent some time making sure I got the tone right.
Then I tried to send it Guess what? They had a ***ing image captcha on
the send message thing and I couldn't get past it.
Exit one really, really annoyed and frustrated blind person.
I wonder what their next trick will be? Banning reading out loud
without some sort of performance licence?
Best
Adrienne
Mar 23, 2:21 am, Esther<[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Ray,
You're correct that the policy of blocking VoiceOver access to eBook content in
the Kindle app arises from the Author's Guild suit, but the guild is mostly
worried about readers who are not visually impaired making use of these
text-to-speech capabilities to listen to ebooks instead of buying audiobooks.
It's the very fact that Apple has been building in VoiceOver capabilities into
every iOS device and computer that constitutes the danger, from their point of
view. That's why a Kindle app for the PC, that can be used with screen readers
like JAWS, has been released, but there is no similar application for the Mac.
If the only way that you could access the Kindle ebook content on your computer
was by investing in blindness-specific software that equals or exceeds the cost
of your computer, it's pretty hard to argue that you configured your machine
this way just to avoid buying the audiobook versions. But the fact that every
iPhone, iPod Touch, an iPad now support VoiceOver, and that the same is true
for every Mac, means that any user of an iPhone, Mac, etc. could enable
VoiceOver functionality in reading Kindle ebooks, if this capability were not
explicitly blocked.
And so, if you carry the argument of the Author's Guild to its natural conclusion,
non-visually impaired Kindle customers who find VoiceOver's reading "good
enough" to listen to, will turn on this feature instead of buying audiobook versions
that they would otherwise purchase.
HTH. Cheers,
Esther
On Mar 22, 2012, at 4:03 PM, Ray Foret Jr wrote:
That's not quite true. It's not because of copy right. The truth is this.
It's because of the Author's guild. They don't want the blind to be able to
read their books without extra costs. Their twisted reasoning is that the text
to speech tecnhology will rob them of sales. Every single organization of the
blind is fighting this stipid infantile logic.
Sincerely,
The Constantly Barefooted Ray!!!
Now a very proud and happy Mac user!!!
Skype name:
barefootedray
Facebook:
facebook.com/ray.foretjr.1
On Mar 22, 2012, at 8:39 PM, Hank Smith wrote:
so because of stupid drm copy write crap the blind can't read the ebooks?
On 3/22/2012 6:30 PM, Esther wrote:
Hi Jeff,
There are a number of ebook apps that specifically disable VoiceOver's ability to
access the content in order to preserve digital rights management. This is also
true if you try to use the Barnes& Noble Nook app, for example. You'll notice
that usually you can access everything except for the actual content of the text.
That's being blocked. You can verify this by taking a screen capture, and sending
the results to an OCR app like Prizmo or TextGrabber. The OCR app will tell you
what the contents are, but obviously you're not going to read the book by screen
capturing every page and sending it to an OCR app.
If you want to read another example of this viewpoint, that the ability of
screen readers to access text would promote copyright violation, take a look at
Greg Kearney's posted response from Fictionwise in the archives, sent in reply
to his inquiry about ebook accessibility for their ebook reading app just a few
months after the iPhone 3GS was released with VoiceOver support:
• Fwd: Response for Support Ticket #102495
http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg0620...
Since this is the Mail Archive post, if you're reading on your computer, you
can also use access key shortcuts of Control-N to read down the thread for
other reader comments.
Best,
Esther
On Mar 22, 2012, at 2:59 PM, Ray Foret Jr wrote:
Forget it. It ain't gonna happen.
It ain't accessible at all.
Sincerely,
The Constantly Barefooted Ray!!!
Now a very proud and happy Mac user!!!
Skype name:
barefootedray
Facebook:
facebook.com/ray.foretjr.1
On Mar 22, 2012, at 7:38 PM, Jeff Berwick wrote:
Hi All,
I downloaded the Kindle app so I can read some of the books that my wife is
reading. I can't, however, figure out how to get it to work. Has anybody had
success with the Kindle app? Is it accessible? Any tips?
It looks like, to me, that it is displaying images instead of rendering the
text.
Thx,
Jeff
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