Thank you all for your advice. To address some piddly points of clarification: 1. Apparently I meant to ask about mobi files, not epub. I am talking about e-books rendered specifically for kindle. Thank you, Marcello, I will look into Kindle for PC. 2. I won't be buying a Kindle, because the dog objects to starving. Also, that way lies bankruptcy as I start buying electronic copies of the 2000 books I already own... 3. Personally, bright light annoys the bejeebers out of me. Part vampire, part mogwai... -- Mjit RaindancerStahl answerwitch@gmail.com

And, for the blind/visually impaired, there's nothing available to read mobipocket books on the mac. There is no osx version of the mobi pocket reader, and most of the providers who have put out programs that work on osx did not follow the apple accessibility guidelines when designing their apps, thus the applications that do exist do not work with voiceover, leaving all voiceover users out of the loop when it comes to reading these proprietary formats on their computers. This is why I will use project gutenberg texts first, pdf files second, and epub formats if I must (since those are just simple html files I can load into safari after I've uncompressed them, and ripped out all the junk that makes them epub formatted). Amazon did nothing to make their reader accessible, even after a suit from the national federation for the blind, (wwhich both surprised me that nfb would do such a thing considering how many other readers are out there they never even batted an eyelash at, and the fact that amazon did nothing to assist). But, since there are no stand-alone readers that work for the blind or visually impaired users who can't read print because they can't see well enough to do so, and the fact that almost every discussion with publishers about making things accessible generally degenerate into piracy issues instead, I don't see this state of affairs changing anytime soon. Case in point. When the palm reader came out for the pc, version 1.0 worked perfectly with windows screen readers. I purchased a couple hundred pdb books from peanut press who became palmdigitalmedia who became (eventually) fictionwise bought by barns and nobel, and from fictionwise (who at the time was a separate entity). Someone managed to crack the encryption they were using for their books, so they came out with version 1.01 which changed the encryption, and also made some gui updates. In so doing so, most of the key combinations which made the 1.0 version perfectly usable by screen readers were removed, thus rendering the 1.01 version (for all practical purposes) useless. I was out several hundred bucks since I could no longer read these books. Lucky for me, I read a lot, and quickly, so had finished most of my material before this change happened, and found replacements in other formats for the rest. Also, mobipocket has gone through several revisions, an early version allowed screen readers to work just fine with the app, but later versions which incorporated antitheft technology and forced screen images instead of text, rendered the application completely unusable via screen readers as well. so all the books I had checked from the fictionwise library went back unread, because the program no longer worked. These are considerations that do not get made when companies develop their stand-alone readers (or other devices for that matter) There's many many cases where a company has produced a product that talks, but is completely useless to the blind/visually impaired user, because only the end result talks, not the steps getting to that point. Putting braille on mac machines is nice, but not if there's no way to see what's on the screen. Too often, these things are what make an excellent product useless for those of us who can't see it. Often times, a few more minutes of thinking at the outset would solve most of these problems, especially for products that already talk, since adding a few more pieces of voice would make it complete usable. Ebooks are no different. The fact that pg offers things in plain text is great, I can grab a book, put it in any format I like (or none at all for that matter) and know it will work with my system. When a reader comes out that allows me to read ebooks w/o sighted assistance, I'll be one of the first in line to purchase one, because reading is something I do a lot of, and I'd love a way to take books with me without having to convert to audio first, or run through some indexing program first before loading on a dvecie specifically developed with the blind user in mind (book corrier and book port are two examples) Anyway, I've gotten way off topic here, but my primary intent here was just to point out that although reading devices are great, they don't work for everyone, no matter what some folks might think.

Umm, the fact that a program has a read allowd (adobe, kendel, so forth) doesn't help the visually impaired user one single bit if the said user can't get to the content to tell it to read outloud to begin with. Again, I point to braille on the keys of the mac machines. What good is it to have the keys accessible if the screen remains unusable? The same exact concept applies here. Not every blind/visually impaired user is going to have sighted assistance to open the book of their choice, and get to the read aloud function of said book. And, just for reference, I'm in the us, but the us has had (and still does) copyright exempt laws for quite some time, so regardless of what ebook makers claim, it is *not* illegal for me to rip copyright protection off of a book in order to make it possible for me to read it. Of course, in practice, this is rarely worth the effort it takes to track down such applications, nor is it worth the effort it takes for me to develop such a program myself (which I have done on occasion), generally because, in most cases, books are available elsewhere in accessible formats, but it's those few percent of books that are not available elsewhere that cause problems, and the absolute pits that fictionwise support has dropped into lately is rapidly pushing me to abandon reading some of my favorite magazines (analog and asimov) just because it is no longer cost effective for me to do so. I'll just go back to subscribing to the nls version, and let fictionwise keep their lack of subscriptions, gift cards, zip downloads, and the myriad of other complaints I've asked about in the past 3-4 months. Apparently they don't feel it necessary to answer most support emails anymore, and when they do, it's usually with a canned response that tells me to read the faq or something equally silly, since the whole reason for writing is because the faq says something and the site doesn't mesh with what it says. Nevermind the fact that I've been a member (of the buywise club for that matter) for nearly 10 years, and you can see why I prefer places like pg and webscriptions.net even if it doesn't give me access to everything I'd like to read. On Mar 7, 2011, at 9:09 AM, a@aboq.org wrote:

Hi Travis,

Isn't the Kindle's integrated text-to-speech feature useful for your purposes? Like I mentioned, it's very easy to convert any and all EPUB files, HTML files, TXT files, RTF files, PDF files, etc., into Kindle's native format (MOBI or PRC). And then, the Kindle would read the content to you aloud, wouldn't it? (It's kind of funny, because even if you load a non-English text into a Kindle and switch on the text-to-speech feature, the guy or lady will just go ahead and read the entire foreign text as if it consisted of English words, which means: they will mispronounce every word, and many people here in non-English Europe find that pretty funny to listen to.) :-D

PS: I believe here in Slovakia, sight-impaired people enjoy an exemption from the copyright laws which allows them unlimited owning and/or copying/sharing of electronic versions of any/all books they might be interested in. They have set up their own password-protected electronic library. I have communicated about this with the library's managers.

-- Yours, Alex. www.aboq.org

[processed by "The Bat!", Version 4.2.10.12]

_______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d

Re:for the blind/visually impaired....

PG can't fix all the ebook reader issues, but, PG can put their own house in order.

My understanding is that one is required to make web sites accessible.

In the case of HTML books that PG puts up on their website, that means that alt-tags on images need to be there, and to be meaningful and useful. And that hacks such as initial caps -- when implemented in a way that breaks screen readers -- should not be permitted. Also, HTML books that implement some of its text as image-only should not be accepted. Text needs to be implemented AS text, and not as images. Admittedly, I don't read a lot of books from pg in html format, I usually grab the txt, or pdf versions, and read them in either text edit, preview, or another pdf viewer. However, if there are html books with passages of text as images, I agree wholeheartedly, that

On Mar 8, 2011, at 11:11 AM, Jim Adcock wrote: this breaks all kinds of accessibility rules, as well as breaks a few common sense rules as well. Since the intent of html is to display the text in whatever format the browser has been configured to do so, turning final drafts back into fixed formats doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, especially if that fixed format isn't necessary for the conveying of information (such as a graph or visual representation to make a point) This kind of thing has indeed become rather prevalent on the web, and I'd thought pg was (thankfully) immune to such things. But, then again, this is exactly the reason I opt for plain text whenever possible, for exactly that reason.

...

But, then again, this is exactly the reason I opt for plain text whenever possible, for exactly that reason.

What does PG's non-standard remapping of underscore and asterisk to be reinterpreted as typographical markers in their "plain text" files do to your screen reader? That depends (ostly) on what the punctuation level is set at. Generally, I have it set to some, in which case, it ignores such

On Mar 13, 2011, at 8:24 AM, Jim Adcock wrote: things, and just reads the text. If I have it set to all (as I do when programming) it simply reads them as the characters they are. Most visually impaired folks who use screen readers dial down the punctuation, because it gets quite irritating to hear periods, question marks, semi colons, and the like, so we usually set the screen reader at a level which ignores all extraneous punctuation, though with some screen readers, punctuation is used to control the synthesizer, and so things get screwed up when large amounts of it is used. For example, voiceover (the screen reader built into osx) used to use two left brackets to control voiceover (actually, I think it still does, but it's a little more picky now about what triggers changes) and since objective C has lots and lots of brackets in it, when reading source code on tiger early versions, it was extremely difficult to read certain passages of source, because of the [[ and ]] combinations that showed up in the code naturally. Apple apparently has worked on this, because it's no longer nearly impossible to just hit read all, and let voiceover read the entire source code of a complete program source file, something that was nearly impossible under early versions of tiger. Other external synthesizers have their own control commans for speech rate, volume, pitch and the like, and sometimes those were triggered by a question mark (?) followed by numbers and letters to activate/ change speech settings. Occasionally, a stray text file or two would unknowingly trigger such changes, and it caused no end of frustration for the user who had to figure out what just happened. Most screen readers these days use software generated speech, and send commands directly to the screen reader, no longer relying on such cludges, but some folks still use those external synthesizers because it makes the cpu load lighter on resource poor computers who don't have the spare computing cycles to drive the software synthesizers. I have several such synths here, and although I don't use them regularly, I do still haul them out from time to time when doing work on linux or dos (yes, there's still work to be done on dos) so I still encounter silly things like this once in a great while, but on modern osx and windows systems, these sorts of things don't happen very often if at all.

Am 03.03.2011 um 10:49 schrieb a@aboq.org:

On Wednesday, 2nd March 2011 at 21:16:35 (GMT -0500), Mjit RaindancerStahl wrote:

That all being said, I recommend to no one to actually *read* books on a big-screen device. For reference purposes, Mobipocket Reader or the reader integrated in Calibre are marvellous. For enjoyable reading, Well, that is good if you do have a dedicated reader! I personally will not shell out no more that $ 50 for a dedicated reading device.

though, that is friendly towards your eyesight and reading comfort? You've got to go to a smaller-screen device instead, ideally a Kindle, Kindle DX, or iPad. I prefer my laptop! Still looking for a nice reading program though. can live calibre and adobe.

...

I want to support them, but I don't have the extra $300 for a Kindle...

Kindle does *not* cost $300, but only $139 nowadays. That's a ridiculously low price, considering how expensive the Kindle was only a few years ago.

Check : http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-DX-Wireless-Reader-3G-Global/dp/B002GYWHSQ Price at $379 or $329 for an older DX! Yes, there is a $139 kindle with just a 6" screen. Personally, I would suggest the iPad. The Kindle app is still available, was update on Valentines Day. Then again I am very bias!! regards Keith.

I talked with various optometrists, opthalmologists, etc., about this and they say ruining your vision like this is total barnyard material and that all you need to recover from any eyestrain is a little rest, and that there is no cumulative effect. . .not to mention that it has been harder to strain your eyes without knowing it that rumors say. You can even look up much of the supporting research online. On Thu, 3 Mar 2011, a@aboq.org wrote:

On Thursday, March 2011 at 11:21:39 (GMT +0100), Keith J. Schultz:

...

I personally will not shell out no more that $ 50 for a dedicated reading device.

I believe that's being rather petty and unreasonable, at the cost of your own reading pleasure, and very likely also your eye-sight, which is a precious thing. Reading on a Kindle device strains your eyes far less than staring at an LCD screen.

I'm not wealthy by any means, but I happily shelled out hundreds of dollars for earlier Kindle versions. Therefore, the current low price of $139 seems like bread-crumbs to me, and I can't understand how anyone who truly loves literature can fail to pay that low price to get a Kindle. ;-)

Yes, $139 is for the small-screen Kindle, but that's still radically better than reading on a laptop. And, for reading on-the-go or in direct sunlight outside your home, the $139 Kindle is an unbeatable deal. (I do prefer the large Kindle DX for reading at home, because there I can also set the font to be of a comfortably large, but not huge, size -- which is another boon for your eye-sight.)

...

Personally, I would suggest the iPad.

The iPad is great for reading after it gets dark. But, in daylight, nothing beats a Kindle, while it would seem kind of silly to me to stare at a back-lit screen for many hours every day while there is ample light all around you, from natural sources.

I do prefer the iPad over reading the Kindle while having to use a lamp to see the Kindle. Using a lamp, including a dedicated Kindle lamp, has the big disadvantage that you need to position your Kindle exactly right in relation to the source of light, such as a light-bulb, and I hate that kind of inflexibility imposed on a reader. It's so 20th century, having to turn your body/arms/hands/reading device towards the source of light, when instead you could simply use the iPad to serve as its own source of light!

(Oh, and by the way, Apple introduced iPad 2 yesterday, which reduces the original iPad's weight by 15%, and its thickness by 33%, while the price remains the same: a very reasonable $499 for the basic version.)

...

The Kindle app is still available

But the Kindle app for the iPad/iPhone is extremely low-quality. I don't recommend it; just use Stanza instead. In addition to the outrageously wide margins, wasting lots of the iPad's screen real estate, the Kindle app does *not* offer the same functionality as the hardware Kindle. As a good example, when you want to highlight a passage in the Kindle app stretching over several pages, this is not possible in the Kindle app, and the passage you highlighted will break into 2. In contrast, on the hardware Kindle, highlighting a passage across pages works flawlessly.

All right, but it's undeniable that different reading circumstances....

I think what is "undeniable" is that different people have different eyes and different brains and fundamentally different ways of reading things and that some things that matter very much to some people matter not at all to others. For example "the screen door effect" drive me and many other people I know batty when it comes to LCD display -- so we like reading on e-Ink displays. But other people don't notice the problem at all and couldn't care less. On LCD displays some people love white on black, other people say you have got to be crazy! Again, what people love and hate in reader devices varies all over the map, which is why we need to be willing to meet customers where THEY are.