Fahrenheit 416

    Ray Bradbury, author of many well loved and prophetic novels, has long had nothing but contempt for technological developments in media.  he hates the Internet, saying, "There's nothing there!" and has resisted the development of ebooks passionately.  He feels both along with television and no doubt any number of other recent inventions are taking people away from such worthwhile pursuits as reading.
     Ironically, he has h ad to bow to the inevitable.  His book Fahrenheit 451is being released by his publisher as an ebook.  I say ironically because this very fact means that in spite of his prediction, people are reading.
     I have my own perspective on this, as my regular readers (of electronic text) know. 
As a voracious reader who happens to be blind, I have long been stuck with reading what the National Library Services www.loc.gov/nls make available, certainly wonderful but slim pickin's and slow and resource intensive. Thanks to ebooks I can read and read and read. I am myself a novelist, had twice as many credits as I need for my degree in English, and have quite narrow tastes in reading, utterly unserved by NLS. So needless to say when I heard of Bradbury's attitude, it really pissed me off. I know a lot of people who confuse technology with some of its less ideal examples. Ebooks are not television or video games or Facebook. They are what any book was to start with, the product of a mind and imagination. Mr. Bradbury ought to recall that his books, each and every one of them, started out as thought.  (I recall gazing at Candace Robb's head at a Historical Novel Society conference and thinking, "My God, that's where Owen Archer was born.")
     As I tell my friends who insist that only print on paper books are really reading, just as soon as print on paper books start reading themselves aloud to me, I'm there.
     By the way, 416 degrees F is the temperature at which a Kindle or other ereader will catch fire, according to a web site that apparently has something there.

Fahrenheit 451 Kindle Edition

Things Amazon Could Do To Improve the Kindle's Accessibility

I adore my Kindle 3.  For the first time in about 35 years I can read books that came out recently, pretty much impossible if one is reliant on recorded books "for the blind". 

I believe Amazon is desirous of making the Kindle as accessible a tool as possible.  They have come a long way.  I would like to offer some recommendations of what they can do to improve it further.

• While I am less into the Amazon Storefront on the Kindle able to be read aloud, it being so much easier to buy books on the web site and have them sent to my device, it would be great if some of the tools, like notes, for example,  were also able to use text-to-speech.
• Improve the text-to-speech application the device uses.  I don't so much mean the tone or inflection as get rid of some of the pronunciation quirks.  My Kindle always reads "lunged"  with a hard "g" and the word "mar" as "march".  Granted, som of the presumptions are downright entertaining, like "a fox in a chicken cooperative",  but a little of that goes a long way.
• Put together something to give to publishers and authors who are reluctant to allow text-to-speech on their books that explains that no one who does not have to would choose to listen to the digital reader rather than buy the audiobook, and that disabling text-to-speech prevents people like me from reading their books.  I would be happy to back them up on this.
• Go back through some of the existing content, out of print books for example, and get them onto the Kindle.

I know blind people yell at you all the time.  Not me.  Your wonderful reading device has made a huge improvement in my reading life, my life in general, and I thank you.

Nan Hawthorne

The New Digital Talking Book machine

While we are on the subject of How I Read... here is a video about the new digital reading machine I just received from my local Library for the Blind.



It's interesting that they say you can download books from Bookshare.org, the topic of yesterday's post. I'll have to find out what they mean, since I thought the machine could only read audio books. Perhaps they are referrring to first converting text books to audio, and then using them. I will let you know.

About Bookshare.org and Benetech: A Video

By the way, I just noticed that Nan Hawthorne's Booking History hit 400 posts last week!

---

This blog's editor is not only an author whose work is on BookShare.org, but is also a patron of the service.

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.

Kindle 2: A Possible Drawback for Authors and Their Readers

Getting your novel published on Kindle has lots of attractions. Let's face it, the more ways people can read it the better. The fact that the Kindle also has the "read aloud" feature makes the device not only accessible to people with print impairments, it basically turns a book into an audio book without paying narrators and sound studios.

Unfortunately one unfortunate fact has come to light. We already know that the average audio book reader, meaning the person, not the device, will not likely tolerate the mechanical nature of the text-to-speech voices. Print impaired people are used to it by now. While the books recorded by the National Library Services are professionally narrated, our various speech output applications have about as much resemblance to a human voice as any run-of-the-mill robot.Any authors worrying about the competing with their audio books can relax. It ain't gonna happen.

Now a new problem has come to.. well, not light, but definitely sound. While happily listening to Helen Hollick's splendid Sea Witch on my own Kindle I was dismayed by the pronunciation of the main characters' names: Jessamiah and Tiola. My computer reads them as jess-uh-MY-uh and TEE oh la. That's pretty close to what Hollick intended. But the Kindle 2 reads them as juh SAY me ack and SHY luh! Say what?

I contacted Amazon's Digital Rights people and asked whether the pronunciation of words in the Kindle's dictionary can be edited. The answer was no.

Now if I was as attached to one of my characters as I know Hollick is to Jessamiah (I am, but "Lawrence" and "Shannon" are easy to prounce) I would absolutely refuse to let his name get so mangled and would simply not put the book on the Kindle. This won't be an issue if you, as a novelist, don't care whether the people who prefer or have no choice other than to listen to books read yours. (If the latter is the case, then expect a withering look and n o review from me!) But my educated guess is that the Sea Witch series will never be on Kindle.

Whether the Kindle's makers have any clue about this limitation, I can't say. I personally believe that the "read aloud" feature on it was purely a gimmick to sell a new generation of Kindle. If that's what it is, then hey, I am happy to take advantage as I was with the first talking watches. But I'm with Hollick if, as a result, she never puts her books on their catalog.

Separate but Unequal

If you are looking for the Historical Fiction Round-i[. it is the post immediately prior to this one in chronology. The following is reprinted from That's All She Read.


I will write "she" and "her" in this story, but this could happen just as well to a man.

Once upon a time, a Reader walked into her local tax-supported library to pick up a book she wanted to read. A big sign over the door proclaimed "New undamaged copies of books available!" Reader was delighted because for some time the library's collection had been deteriorating. About one out of every five books had sections damaged and even ripped out of the books. Now at last she could take a book out of the library confident that she wouldn't get halfway into it only to find a large section unreadable. She entered the library, then stopped. All she saw were the usual books. The only thing different was that there were now dozens of locked doors along the walls. She approached the Librarian.

Reader: I came to take out a particular book. Is it available in the new undamaged format?

Librarian: Yes, it is!

Reader: Great. Please get it for me.

Librarian: I'm sorry. You can only read it in one of these rooms.

Reader: Why?

Librarian: We promised the publishers we wouldn't let their books out to just anyone.

Reader: Oh! Well, all right, then give me a room too.

Librarian: You have to have a key to get into a room. Sign up for one here, please.

Reader: (Fills out the form and gives it back to the Librarian.) All right, here you are. May I have the book and the room now?

Librarian: I'm sorry, we don't have any rooms available.

Reader: But.. but.. I used to be able to read any books I wanted. Why can't I do that now?

Librarian: I told you. We don't have enough rooms. They are being built by a Canadian company and we have been beta testing them. These things take time.

Reader: What am I supposed to do in the meantime?

Librarian: There are always the books over in the possibly-damaged section.

Reader: I don't want to get into a book only to find I can't finish it or that I am missing a part of it.

Librarian: You can always buy a room of your own.

Reader: Buy one? Why should I have to buy one? I pay my taxes faithfully and willingly. I already paid my share. Why do I have to shell out more money?

Librarian: I'm sorry you feel that way. Others are waiting for rooms too, you know.

Reader: Why can't you just issue keys to the library and let us read the books in this huge room with all the chairs and tables?

Librarian: We looked at this problem long and hard and decided this was the best way to handle the problem. You will just have to be patient.

Reader: So what you are telling me is that if I want to read this book, I must either take a chance on a damaged book, buy my own room, or patiently wait for a room to become available?

Librarian: That's right.

If this story seems ridiculous, it is, but it's happening. Right now people with print impairments, like blind and partially sighted people, are relgated to reading cassette books that are often damaged so badly that they can't be enjoyed. To solve this problem, the National Library Services of the U. S. Library of Congress has created downloadable books that will be available to those people who cannot or prefer not to use the Internet on cartridges they will send out by mail. Patrons will receive reading devices in which to put the cartridge to read the book. In order to use the cartridges they ill need to be issued a key that activates the book.

The problem is that there are not enough devices and cartridges to go around. There probably will not be for many months. In the meantime a reader like myself will have to make do with the cassette books. Unlike every other taxpayer in the country, I will not have access to the book until such time as I am issued a device. I can buy one, but I wonder why I should have to if no other taxpayer does? Especially when there is another way to accomplish the same thing. The library could issue proprietary software to make every computer such a device. They could still require a key. This would cost a great deal less and happen a lot sooner.

I feel as a person with a disability I am being required to accept what we all thought went out of our society thanks to the equality movements of the last century. Of course in reality separate but equal continues to be the rule in some places, but at least not officially. If at the end of my story the Librarian had added, "You African Americans/Jews/women or the like will just have to be patient. We are doing the best we can." there would be outrage. They are saying it, but they are saying, "You blind and otherwise print impaired people will just have to wait."

Someone pointed out to me that this plan has been in the works for more than five years. Perhaps I should have spoken up sooner. I will concede that, but I didn't. Others, however, have. Yet the typical government tendency to do something the least efficient and the most expensive won out anyway.

The solution is simple. The NLS needs to get over whatever arcane notion they have about not making the books accessible to eligible persons on a person's computer. As an author and publisher, I feel this should satisfy the Fair Use provision of the Copyright Act.

And then we will be able to read happily ever after.

If you are tempted to think or say "Well, but we are talking about the blind! It's no one's fault they are blind. It's just how things are!" just please remember you are talking about me, and if I have ever done anything for you whether a favor or enlightenment through a review or entertained or educated you with my writing, reconsider whether I should be regarded as a beggar who cannot be a chooser. I plan to send this blog post to my legislators.

I would like to hear from you all how you would respond to the scenario I painted above.

Thanks!

Nan Hawthorne
hawthorne at nanhawthorne.com

Please Share Your Work with People Who Are Blind

The Kindle2 Has Added One More Tool

Authors, reach a group of voracious and engaged readers: people who are blind or partially sighted.

Technology has exploded the field of accessible reading beyond the old half speed "talking book" discs and recorded cassettes. People who cannot read print now can receive their reading materials via dowloadable books from a few different sources. Whereas it used to take months or even longer for a book to make its way into a format a person who is print disabled to read, now we can have access to books almost as quickly as the general public. Make sure your books are part of this cornucopia opening up.

I am an author, and I am also a severely visually impaired reader. Once upon a time I had to wait for reading material to be made available through the National Library Service (NLS) of the Library of Congress. The developing ebook and related technologies have changed that very much for the better!

You can make sure your books reach people like me by making them available through the following digital formats:

1. Digital text. You can make your own book available as a text or accessible PDF format through your own web site, but if you understandably worry about piracy, consider going through an organization like BookShare.org. Under the Chaffee Amendment to the copyright law in the U.S. an organization can make books accessible to people who are certified as blind or otherwise print impaired (dyslexic, for example.) Access is limited only to those people who could not pick up your book and read it and no one else.

For more information look at http://www.bookshare.org/about/donateBooks and click on Publishers or Authors. Tell them Nan Hawthorne sent you.

2. Kindle. The Kindle2 is not yet fully accessible as the speech output available for books and magazines is not functional for the device's menus. However, people with low vision or who have help can still access the books. The voices are excellent. There has been some wrangling about whether making your book available for speech output will cut into your audio book sales. Let me assure you that few sighted people will opt for the computer voice over a professionally narrated book. In fact, I think Amazon.com is rather optimistic that this will catch on. In the meantime, people like me benefit, because I am used to worse reading voices than Kindle's. You can block Amazon.com from allowing your book to be readable by speech engines, but I ask you not to. Put your book on Kindle and let us h ave at it.

To learn about putting your book on Kindle, see http://dtp.amazon.com. You can ask your publisher to arrange this or do it yourself.

3. Publish an ebook. An ebook can be as simple as a plain text version of your book. To make a better product though, you can look into a number of resources. Self Publish eBooks is a site with information on software to produce ebooks, ebook publishers, and advice on all aspects of ebook publishing and distribution. Just make sure when you are either creating tyour own ebook for sale or going through an ebook publisher that the final file is in a format acfessible to to screen readinf and braille output applications that blind people use to access their computers.

This is just one of the sites that can advise you on self publishing an ebook: http://www.selfpublishebooks.com/index.html

I also recommend becoming a member of the Independent Authors Guild. It is free. Even if you publish through a a traditional publisher, this group of mostly independently published authors share a ton of information on all aspects of publishing including marketing ideas. Most traditionally published authors receive little or no help with marketing from their publishers, so learn from us what we have come up with as a matter of necessity.

But why give your book away at all? You aren't necessarily giving your book away. You can sell ebooks and certainly you can get your cut in Kindle sales. But even if you donate the book to a group like BookShare or even give a digital text version to people who are print impaired, remember you are giving to someone who would not have bought your book anyway. It simply would not be accessible to them. Nevertheless, they do talk to other people about books they enjoyed and buy books as gifts. You lose nothing and you gain some excellent karma and the potential for more sales. Plus you will have reached a particularly appreciative group of readers. Just come by AccessibleWorld.org's many book discussion groups to hear for yourself.

Jon the discussion at AccessibleWorld.org by plugging in your microphone and downloading the safe chat application at http://www.acccessibleworld.org .

I personally thank you for taking away the sting of walking into my county library and knowing that only a tiny number of the treasures that occupy all those shelves is accessible to me.

Nan Hawthorne
http://www.nanhawthorne.com
Write to me at hawthorne@nanhawthorne.com.

Just Waiting for the Book Sales to Roll In!

This appears in the Consumer Blog on the latest edition of EE/TIMES. The author is Nic Mokhoff, Research Editor.

Nan Hawthorne, a successful historical novelist, was born with Stargardt's Disease, a form of macular degeneration that causes the deterioration of a person's vision over time. Nan has been partially blind her entire life; now with 20/1200 vision, she has learned to live with the disease but has had to constantly rely on others for help when reading and researching.

In fact, to accomplish this, she had to go through the laborious effort of mailing every research book she needed to a third party service that converted the lengthy tomes into spoken word in order for her to complete her research--a frustrating and time consuming endeavor.

Hawthorne has a Plustek BookReader V100, a reading device that has both text-to-speech and optical character recognition. She was impressed with the dramatic results she achieved even from her very first attempt.

"Now I am able to buy the books I need and read them whenever I want. It has dramatically changed my life," said Hawthorne.

Nan Hawthorne is the author of An Involuntary King: A Tale of Anglo Saxon England. She is currently working on the first of a series of historical paranormal mysteries.

Glad to hear i am successful.. articles like this may be self-fulfilling in their prophecies.

To Emote or Not To Emote...

Can you destroy a good novel with a narration that is over the top... or in one case, under the top?

I am reading Michael Curtis Ford's The Ten Thousand. Well, I am listening to it. It is debatable whether listening to books from the National LIbrary Service for the Blind is actually reading. If you ask Braille militants, any blind person who cannot read Braille is illiterate. I will only concede the point if the same person never learned to read print. I was reading at five, thank you, so I don't agree that losing significant sight but not learning Braille makes me suddenly illiterate.

But one point that comes up in any audio interpretation of literature is whether the narrator should turn the reading into a performance. I don't think anyone suggests that readers do so in a monotone, but how much is enough and not too much? I can't imagine listening to Edward Rutherfurd's Dublin Saga without the magnificent narrator and his facvility with all the accents. The reader for the Ford book, however, is so dour that I find myself wondering if the character telling the story, Theo, is as dour, and if I should interpret the story the same.

I am not crazy about Jean Plaidy, but reading her novel of Edward II I can't decide if it is really as bad as it sounds or if the narrator in this one is coloring it even worse? I expect it is both Plaidy and the narrator that have conspired to trivialize and camp up the story of Edward and his "Parrot". I got to the point where Piers Gaveston is about to be murdered, and I am not so sure I want to hear that sad event done in the narrator's flippant Bette Davis ren dition.

More and more of the books I "read" are read to me by a tolerable computer voice. It can be downright funny at times, how the speech synthesizer handles pronunciation. The kingdom in my own novel, "Críslicland" comes out as "C. R. Slickland"! Perhaps the straight un-emoted reading is what is best. I honestly don't know.

A Red Letter Day!

I smiled this morning when I reread an interview with me done by Mirella Patzer on The Historical Novel Review. In the interview I make reference to "a red letter day" when I could put the funds together to buy a device that can literally read a print book aloud. That red letter day coincidentally was yesterday!

As someone who has read since she was five, who read constantly all her life, and who took twice as many credits in English literature in college than she needed for her degree, losing my vision was a bit of a setback.. to say the least. "Talking Books" were heaven.. or shall I say Valhalla-sent. But all these years later, a novelist myself now, I am coming to the end of the supply of books for the blind in areas of my narrow interests. Further as I go through my own teeming list of books at medieval-novels.com I face the frustration of books not available in an accessible format, often the books I want to read the most.

Even more important, research has been complicated since I could not just take a book about Saxon England off the shelf and read it. That has necessitated a certain amount of resourcefulness, that amount being remarkable if I say so myself. I found myself communicating with various experts in academia and elsewhere trying to find the information I needed. Academia proved generous.. others outside that area were more inclined to criticize me for not doing the research myself. That is water under the stone bridge over the Trenta.. both well into the past and also no longer relevant.

About six inches from my left hand dancing on my keyboard is the Plustek Book-Reader, a scanner with a difference. it reads what it scans aloud! Immediatley at that! And clearly in a very human sounding voice.

What it changes in my life, personal and professional, is that it takes away the limiting nature of print accessibility. That is, while most people are only limited in what they read by what is available in the library network and in print, I have had to rely primarily on the far more limited budget of the U.S. National Library Services and my state's branch of libraries for the blind. Whether intentional or not, and I am not so paranoid as to think it is, that limit comes from others deciding what people like me will be permitted to read. I am not the first person to point this out, to which the very existence of Our Right to Know Braille Press and the Womyn's Braille Press attests. Braille is even more dramatically limited. I dobn't even need to limit myself to what's available in the U.S. any more. Though scanning and using OCR software to turn a book into digital text was significant, it is amazingly time consuming. Imagine having to scan an entire book before reading it.

Now I have my little friend, pictured on the right, my "magic book" -- maybe I should have a contest to name it! right here at hand.. so the fact that the intricate details of Aethelræd II's reign is no longer beyond me. You know what? Nothing is. Bring it on! Aethelræd may not be, but I am ready!

How To Get a Book Recorded by the national Library Service

I am sharing this information for the benefit of two slightly overlapping groups:

• People with print impairments who have specific books they would like to listen to but are not currently available through the libraries for the blind; and


• Authors who would like to see their books included in this service which reaches many thousands of avid bibliophiles.

The overlap is at least me.. probably many, many more blind authors.

It is a rather Byzantine path and no guarantees, but here's the skinny.

An interested NLS reader should contact his/her regional library and provide that library with title, author, and ISBN number. The Regional library will then refer it to their state's reporting group. That group meets and shares the info on all the recommended books. From that group, final recommendations are then made to NLS with no guarantee that their recommendation will be accepted.*

For authors, the hardest part may be finding patrons of their state's library for the blind... but you already know one patron though probably not in your state, and that is me. You can also make a point of contacting or joining book discussion groups for blind and other print impaired persons, starting, perhaps, with this Google search. You can become part of my Let's Read Historical Novels book club at Accessible World. There is an active group on Yahoogroups for blind book lovers in the UK, nlbbooktalk, which I myself just joined. The information above is for the USA but I will find a good book discussion email group and add it here soon. In the meantime, you can also become a volunteer yourself, either with a local services for the blind or library for the blind or with BookShare.org.

Speaking of BookShare.org, recording -- and Braille transcription for that matter -- is not the only way blind or otherwise print impaired people get books to read. As several earlier posts on this blog will attest, straight text files readable by the audio software on a person's computer work too. You could be so generous as to donate your book to Bookshare.org or even accept requests for the files from anyone you want to give them to, whether or not blind.

If you read this blog regularly you know I have issues with the selection of books made accessible to print impaired people. The federal program is funded by taxpayers, which includes an awful lot of people who have disabilities, and it bothers me that some paternal group of gatekeepers gets to decide what I read. The criteria can be quite outdated. Years ago when asking why there was a dearth of science fiction, I was told that most blind people are old and old people like westerns and romances. Further, there is the lingering librarian bias against independently published books, which just passes the buck to the profit motivated corporate publishing industry. I am a stout believer in letting the consumer decide what s/he wants to read, and as a person with a print impairment, I don't care to be left out of that loop.

* Thanks to Pat Price of Accessible World for this information.