What was said was that the publishing companies lobbied for ebook readers to not include the feature. And you have to admit, it would be far more convenient for someone visually impaired to have TTS actually in their ebook reader itself, so they can use it without needing to be home or to be carting around a laptop.
Trek lit and Text to Speatch. A plee to the authors.
- Thread starter Blackbird
- Start date
What was said was that the publishing companies lobbied for ebook readers to not include the feature. And you have to admit, it would be far more convenient for someone visually impaired to have TTS actually in their ebook reader itself, so they can use it without needing to be home or to be carting around a laptop.
Three little letters, DRM.
The TTS feature falls under it's perview and so through DRM can be deactivated. The same rules would prevent it being used in the E-book apps for phones or PCs or being copied and pasted into something where it could be read.
But as Ive said I don't know if it's a blanket thing, i.e whether a book which has TTS disabled on the Kindle will have it disabled on the Ipad from Ibooks, or other E-readers. The only reason I use the Kindle for an example here is that when you look at a Kindle book on Amazon it has a little note as to whether TTS is enabled for that title.
Yup. I've removed the DRM from all my Trek books, and tested out the TTS feature of my iPad in iBooks a few months ago, and it sounded just fine. I'd be interested to hear if Kindle users could do the same thing.
Who knows... It may be doable.
I'd like to know if the books that don't work on Kindle work on the Ipad in their original drm state. If they do then I may just get an Ipad and get the books from Ibooks. It's a bit extreme but what's the alternative. It seams mad that sutch a thing as removing DRM, which I'm sure is frowned upon is required in order to allow the visually impaired to access a book. That said I think there's something in U.S law that says it's ok for the VI to remove DRM in order to access a book if it's the only way. Not that that matters to me since Im in the U.K. But may come in handy for someone I suppose.
I haven't tried using TTS in the Kindle app, but I will when I've got a chance. My only Kindle book is Over a Torrent Sea, a few years old, but I can probably download a sample of something newer to find out.
I would heavily recommend against buying from iBooks. Last time I checked (admittedly, 4-5 months ago), the DRM from their store still hadn't been cracked. I purchase my books from B&N before cracking and loading into iBooks.
The legal issue in the US is quite gray. Technically, there are laws that say that removing DRM from books is not legal. However, there are also fair-use laws that at least imply that it is, and judicial rulings in the last year lean more toward supporting that interpretation. Most people who remove DRM from their books do it not in defiance of the law, but rather in the belief that the law tells us that we can read the material that we've purchased however we want, as long as we're not giving away someone else's intellectual property.
Well, I finally got an answer to the question of whether trek books will work with the voiceover feature on an I device, when bought directly from Ibooks.
I am very glad to have found that the answer is YES. I can simply buy the book from Ibooks and start going through it using voiceover without having to do a thing to it.
I am very glad to have found that the answer is YES. I can simply buy the book from Ibooks and start going through it using voiceover without having to do a thing to it.
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