Sean’s Comments (group member since Feb 19, 2009)

Sean’s comments from the Accessible Reading group.

Hi,

It's always interesting to read about blind characters. I wouldn't presume to beta when I haven't read previous books in the series but will certainly bump a title of yours to the top of my list to read next.

Samuel wrote: "EReads publishes titles in places that are much friendlier towards accessibility, like fictionwise.

I couldn't find this particular title elsewhere. Doubtless it'll propagate.

I concur wholeheartedly with your thoughts in general, and the mobi format in particular is horrific (I much prefer EPub).

EReads may have been a bad example but, as unpalatable as it may be there are a large number of small, independent publishers (or even just authors) who use their platform as a single outlet, or cases where specific titles are considerably cheaper. In that sort of case I prefer to give at least a little money to the author rather than dig torrents to avoid Amazon.

I recently bought The Death of Nnanji from the Kindle store here in the UK and was pleasantly surprised to find that it had no DRM whatsoever.

I was able to open the .azw file in the kindle for PC app and use their dreadful text-to-speech voice, or to use Balabolka, open, and save out plain text or audio using a SAPI voice on my system.

I assume that other titles published by EReads on Kindle will similarly have a lack of DRM. GO wild, folks.

Brandon wrote: "What are the options for reading in ePub?

The only two I'm aware of on windows are Epubread for Firefox and Balabolga, the latter of which loses formatting. I tend to convert to text, simply for output with eloquence. The format I buy in usually little resemblance to the format I read in, but it's just the fact that we can actually get the content that I tend to look for.holds

Hi everyone,

This group's been dead quiet, but we're still here.

I just wanted to remind you all that, though Adobe Digital Editions is the defacto standard for EPub books on windows, many smaller publishers that produce EPub do so DRM free. Though Editions has improved in accessibility recently, the books you buy to use there exclusively are usually DRM protected.

I recently bought a few EBooks from http://www.ypdbooks.com and they were all DRM free, well presented, and I'm enjoying them greatly.

So take heart!

Balabolka is a Text-To-Speech (TTS) program. All computer voices installed on your system are available to Balabolka. The on-screen text can be saved as
a WAV, MP3, MP4, OGG or WMA file. The program can read the clipboard content, view the text from DOC, azw, mobi, EPUB, FB2, HTML, ODT, PDF and RTF files, customize
font and background colour, control reading from the system tray or by the global hotkeys.

The program uses various versions of Microsoft Speech API (SAPI); it allows to alter a voice's parameters, including rate and pitch. The user can apply
a special substitution list to improve the quality of the voice's articulation. This feature is useful when you want to change the spelling of words. The
rules for the pronunciation correction use the syntax of regular expressions.Balabolka can save the synchronized text in external LRC files or in MP3 tags
inside the audio files. When an audio file is played with players on a computer or on modern digital audio players, the text is displayed synchronously
(at the same way, as lyrics for songs).

Standard Size: 5662 KB  
Version: 2.1.0.489  
Licence: Freeware  
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/7  
Languages:
English, Bulgarian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil),
Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Ukrainian
Portable Version: (5421 KB)Portable Balabolka does not require an installation and can be run from a USB drive.A computer must have at least one voice installed.

Balabolka's home page is here.