[A2k] Kindle protest photos and video, from Gizmodo

[Claude Almansi]

On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 5:05 AM, James Love <james.love@keionline.org> wrote:
> This is a pretty good report on the Reading Rights Coalition's Authors Guild/Kindle Demo, including pictures and video.  The protester signs are great.
>
> Short URL:
>
> http://bit.ly/RmQKQ

And the discussion in the comments is very interesting too, because it
was started by people who - genuinely, it seems - confused
text-to-speech with audio books, hence did not understand the reasons
for the protest. So there is quite a bit of argumentation going on.

One point that might be worth underlining a bit more is that
reading-disabled people who have to use text-to-speech are not
interested in it becoming more like audio books. They listen to an
audio book like non-reading-disabled people do, appreciating the
acting, dramatic suspense,  and so on. But they use text to speech to
really read, i.e. to get at the content in each person's own way
(reading is an individual interactivity with a written content). So
what they want is the possibility to accelerate, in an equivalent of a
not-reading-disabled person's skimming,  to skip from title to title
and from table of content to the part they want to focus on, etc.

With Gabriele Ghirlanda (see the e-mail about the Italian translation
of the Reading Rights Coalition's petition), we once did a podcast of
him reading the site www.bellinzona.ch with text-to-speech [1]. I had
to ask him to slow down: for me, at his normal speed, it was like
trying to decipher one of those early unpuctuated manuscript with no
separation between words.

But we kept a few seconds of his normal speed at the beginning, and
ended with a reading at the same speed of the welcome text by the
Mayor of Bellinzona on that page. Afterwards, when I listened to this
podcast with sighted people, they invariably laughed at first, because
they were baffled. The only sighted person who didn't was a former
high school student who is dyslexic. His immediate reaction was:
"Where can I get one of those programs and how much do they cost?"

"How much do they cost", because  in Switzerland, if you are not
certified as a dyslexic before the end of middle-school, you are not
entitled to the coverage by the invalidity insurance for assistive
tech - or for reading therapy either (I don't know about other
countries). And this former student, being very intelligent,  had
manage to get through until high school with his teachers mistaking
his print reading difficulties for laziness.  For people like him [2],
the Kindle text-to-speech might be an affordable solution, maybe (but
see below).

Unfortunately, Amazon didn't answer the question about speed control,
which is essential for reading by ear, when I wrote them about the
Kindle's text-to-speech [3]. It can be argued that by advertising the
Kindle's TTS as something to listen to passively, for instance while
driving, they have encouraged the confusion of TTS with audio books
that caused the Authors' Guild knee-jerk reaction.

Reading-disabled people need TTS to actively read by ear, just as
those of them who know Braille actively read digital texts with a
Braille bar. This is not the same thing as passively listening to an
audio book. The problem is that non-print-reading-disabled people
accept that Braille reading is real reading, but have more difficulty
in grasping the concept of reading by ear being real reading too, i.e.
different than just passively listening to a performance.

So it is necessary to debun the Authors' Guild's assimilation of TTS
with audio books. But it is just as necessary to address Amazon's
ambiguous commercial use of TTS. In order to really read by ear,
speech synthesis alone is not enough, people must be able to control
the way it works: speed, navigation etc. And that's made very
difficult by the proprietary format and DRM of the Kindle e-books.

This obtains for Google books too, though they are not be DRM'd in the
traditional sense so far, but made of open-standard JPEG images of
text powered by a simple-text file that is kept hidden [4], except for
works is in the public domain.  But this simple-text version of PD
works, which could in theory be read by TTS is a) often a crummy
unedited OCR'd scan; b) available only peacemeal, page by page, which
defeats real reading by ear.

This is particularly important as Amazon and Google threaten to corner
most of the digital book market - see Manon's  e-mails about
tomorrow's  Google Book Settlement KEI Brown Bag
<http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/a2k/2009-April/004097.html> and
<http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/a2k/2009-April/004110.html>.

Best

Claude


Best

Claude


[1] <http://noimedia.podspot.de/post/ascoltare-il-web-con-jaws-sotto-la-guida-di-gabriele-ghirlanda-bis/>
- normally, I give a transcript of audio podcasts, but in this case, I
twiddled the settings of a browser to get an approximate visual
equivalent of what was being heard (had I known about the Fangs addon
for Firefox that shows you what TTS reads in a page, I would have used
that).

[2]  Between 2 and 10% of Swiss schoolchildren are dyslexic, for
instance, according to
<http://www.tsrdecouverte.ch/4-12/dossiers/all/dyslexie-dossier/dyslexie-article>
(in French). The proportion is likely to be the same elsewhere.

[3] Amazon's answers (and my questions) are in
<http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dhrq6wzn_242g4d3wzdr>, at the bottom.

[4] i.e. you can get the text image of a page in a Google book by
saving it as "full web page". I wrote more about this
text-images-powered-by-hidden-text trick, which is not only Google's,
in <http://etcjournal.wordpress.com/2009/01/22/unhide-that-hidden-text-please/>