Samuel’s Comments (group member since Apr 17, 2012)

Samuel’s comments from the Accessible Reading group.

In case anyone missed it or didn't know, as of today, the Kindle app is now accessible on the iPhone. Similar to iBooks, it uses voiceover to read the text. This isn't my favourite, as it does mean I can't lock the screen to save power, but it is far better than nothing. In my opinion, between the Kindle app and Voice Dream Reader, the iPhone is now the leading accessible reading device on the market.

This thread seemed like a logical extension of the Free Ebooks thread. If it isn't free, where can it be legally purchased in accessible format? Let's all post about the stores where we purchase our books, and what we need to do to make them accessible.

In order to start things off, I'll contribute that, for those of you wanting to legally own Harry Potter books, the store at:
http://shop.pottermore.com
offers audio and ebook versions of the Harry Potter series by J.K Rowling that are completely accessible. The ebooks are sold as DRM free epub files, that you can read with your iPhone, Balabolka, or anything else that supports epub. The audio books are sold as 44.1 64 KBPS Joint Stereo mp3 files, packaged in a zip file. Note that while neither ebooks or audio books contain DRM, they are both watermarked. The purchase and checkout process is entirely accessible.

As a somewhat off-topic aside, those of you who are Harry Potter fans, might be interested in the following thread about the accessibility of the Pottermore game:
http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic...
If you are interested in the new writing by Rowling herself, check that thread for tips on how to best access it. If you are mainly interested in the gaming elements, you're mostly out of luck.

This one is an old one, that I read a long time ago, but I thought I'd post it never-the-less.

The book is Agent to the Stars, by the best selling author of Old Man's War, John Scalzi. He originally wrote it in order to perfect his novel writing craft. But even though it's his first novel, it's well worth reading. Unfortunately, it's only available in HTML, not epub or any other easily downloadable format. Your best bet is to visit the page and do a save web page as. You can read the entire book at the following URL:
http://www.scalzi.com/agent/

Once again, this is Science Fiction. A description of the book, as taken from goodreads, follows:

Agent to the Stars is a gleeful mash-up of science fiction and Hollywood satire from acclaimed novelist John Scalzi (Old Man's War), a film critic since 1991 and author of The Rough Guide to Science Fiction Film. It's a whole new look at alien encounters -- and a view of Tinseltown you've never seen before.

I don't torrent, and I don't purchase Kindle books. If it's a self published author, and I can find contact info, I email the author encouraging them to make the ebook available on platforms other than Kindle. Anything to do away with Amazon! But either way, if it's Kindle only, I don't read the book, unless I can get it via CNIB/Bookshare/some other legal source. Giving these authors money just encourages them to stick with Amazon, and that's not something I want to do, no matter what.

If this is off topic for this group, please forgive me and feel free to delete it. However, I thought it might be a good idea to have a thread to collect offers (promotional or otherwise) of free ebooks that are accessible for us to read. While some authors upload ebooks directly into goodreads, many others do not, for various reasons. So, in the interests of keeping everyone in reading material, and promoting these authors, why not collect these things? We can, of course, exclude obvious and/or specialty websites like Bookshare, and focus on free books offered directly by authors and publishers, that are accessible and would not otherwise be available.

My first offering are the works of fantasy and science fiction author Carl Frederick. While his ebooks are all offered for purchase via Kindle, and apparently not elsewhere, he will send you an epub formatted, DRM free, copy of the majority of his work, if you send him an email and ask. You can find a list of his books, information about them, and the address to email, at:
http://www.darkzoo.net/clfsite/EPubs.htm

I just finished my copy of Wizards of Science yesterday, and found it to be quite an enjoyable read. You can find my thoughts on it at:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

And, because it's not already in goodreads for reasons I don't quite understand, a description of the book from the author's website follows:

In the novel (hard SF despite its title), Paul, an American college physics major studying in England, and his friend Vicki, an English British history major, become caught up in a physics experiment gone spectacularly wrong. The island of England gets swapped into an alternate time line and is replaced with the England of the eleventh century. Action takes place in both an eleventh century England in a twenty first century world, and also in a twenty-first century England in an eleventh century world. Only Paul and Vicki, with the help of Wulf, a scientist from the twenty-second century, can set things right.
The novel's title alludes to Wulf and his descendents, trapped in Anglo-Saxon Britain. Their advanced science and technology seems to be magic and they are thought to be wizards.
Although not not specifically written as such, the novel might be considered YA as four of the five major characters are under twenty years old, two of them well under.

Why give Amazon my money, in that case? EReads publishes titles in places that are much friendlier towards accessibility, like fictionwise. Even Kobo uses Adobe DRM, and Adobe accessibility, while not wonderful, is at least better than the tiny crumbs Amazon has bothered to throw us. I refuse even to purchase physical products from Amazon, until they make a serious effort to make Kindle accessible on all platforms, so I doubt I will be spending any money to purchase EReads books through them. The only place Amazon gets money from me is through audible.com, but as soon as audiobooks.com comes out with an iPhone app, I will be cancelling my Audible subscription in order to get completely away from the evil that is Amazon.