Further Thoughts on Kindle 2's Text to Speech

See Kindle 2: Possible Drawback for Authors and Readers.

Having my Kindle 2 has been a great thing for me. It has opened up a huge selection of reading material that hitherto was outside my reach at least without a great deal of work and expenditure. Almost as important is that it allows me to be a consumer rather than a recipient of a government program, something that feels more dignified to me. Yes, the libraries for the blind are equivalent to any library, an institution I value and admire. But there is the feel of being done for and cosseted that we certainly will not get past for some time, I think, in our culture.

Ebooks and in particular Kindle 2 allows someone like me, an intellectual and overachiever, some independence and self sufficiency that I just could not have before.

So though obviously from my blog entry I understand authors who might not care to put their books on it because of the limitations of the test to speech, it also makes me sad that those books will be out of my reach for the most part. I tolerate the silliness of text to speech dictionaries because I'd rather do the mental adjustment than miss out altogether.

What I would love to see, given that the ancillary beneficiaries of the text to speech of the Kindle 2 are regarded as rather whiny demanding people and therefore not taken all that seriously as consumers, and to a degree understandably so, is authors and publishers coming forward to make their desires known about higher quality presentation of their work. I am not talking about your championing print impaired people. That;'s for us to do. I hope you will advocate rather for your work, for its optimal presentation. You deserve it. Your reward will be a wider readership.

So rather than dismissing this one outlet, think about speaking up not only as a consumer but as a producer of goods.

Let me just add that I recently, as many of you know, really battled to get independently published books taken seriously by my local library for the blind. They were out of hand rejecting indie books because of a bias that was not without some foundation. The result of my careful education is that this library, anyway, will look at an indie book and judge it uniquely when they choose whether to reproduce it in an accessible format. On its individual merits.

I hope I have brought indie authors and at least one of these libraries together. It seems like one of my quests in life is to get authors to make sure their books are available to the avid and hungry readers who are print impaired and those readers so they have access to "books outside the box".

Kindle is a stepping stone.