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Just found myself having a long argument/discussion with my agent over the Amazon Kindle text-to-speech capability. I'm going to summarise it here. Her point of view: The Kindle reading you the book-you-just-bought infringes the copyright (or at least, the rights) to the audiobook. We've sold audiobook rights and print book rights as separate things. We must stop this. My point of view: When you buy a book, you're also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one's going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors' societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what's good about them with it.

Ticket to Read lets your students practice important reading skills at school, home, or the library--anywhere they can get on the web. Designed for grades K-5, users can work independently on reading skills, which frees the teacher to focus on other students. Exciting texts, continuous feedback, and opportunities to earn points for prizes makes Ticket to Read your student-friendly ticket to success.

"Crossing the Boundaries of Ning * Posted by Badan Barman on August 22, 2010 at 2:28am in Best Practices and Lessons Learned * View Discussions I am a Library and Information Science Professional from India. I developed a Network "LIS Links : A Virtual Community of Indian LIS Professionals" (http://lislinks.com/) over Ning. I dont know whether I will be able to survive with all of you or not. But here, I would like to share something about my site. There nothing special to its design, since I am dealing with information, I gave much emphasis to content rather than the look. But I think I have included some thing special in my network. I request you all to have a look. Here are my specific points ..."

A wonders about free networks being stull online. Exchange with Thunder X. Eric Suesz:\n"Hi, Alex. All free Ning Networks are now locked and can't be accessed. At some point, the space the data takes up on our servers will be overwritten. There's no plan to send you an email when that happens."

A very odd affirmation by Ning's Eric Suesz

On July 24-25, 2008, the World Blind Union and KEI convened an expert group to consider a possible treaty for blind, visually impaired and other reading disabled persons. The meeting was held in Washington, DC. There is a one page talking points memo in English, and the proposed Treaty text, as a three page memo discussing the proposal. These documents are available in English, French and Spanish, in several document formats. The English version of the proposed Treaty text is available in DAISY format from the DAISY Consortium here .

To pay so much attention to Bill Gates' retirement is missing the point. What really matters is not Gates, nor Microsoft, but the unethical system of restrictions that Microsoft, like many other software companies, imposes on its customers.

Many of the 8% of schools [i.e. the 8% of schools that got a grant from the fundation] did not succeed: Their test scores were actually lower than the average scores of schools in their school district, and their college-attending rates climbed painfully slowly, up only 2.5 percentage points over five years. A main strategy of the schools, breaking large high schools into smaller units, on its own guaranteed no overall success, Gates said.

This isn't a new issue. George Kerscher and I wrote a major essay on the topic seven(!) years ago entitled the Soundproof Book. In it, we pointed out the irony that the first generation of ebook readers being inaccessible to blind people. This irony continues: it's a terrible shame that Amazon (and other ebook device vendors) keeps putting out ebook products that are inaccessible to the blind! More on that in another essay. The essence of the Soundproof Book essay was the dueling moral high grounds: author's rights vs. the right to access. Since these are both generally good from society's standpoint, how do you handle the conflict between them?

The blind and other readers have the right for books to be presented to us in the format that is most useful to us, and we are not violating copyright law as long as we use readers, either human or machine, for private rather than public listening. The key point is that reading aloud in private is the same whether done by a person or a machine, and reading aloud in private is never an infringement of copyright. Amazon has taken a step in the right direction by including text-to-speech technology for reading e-books aloud on its new Kindle 2". More details are available on the Forbes website.

Of course, MovieMaker is NOT Open Source, but that's precisely the point...

on downloading MovieMaker (2003)

Listening to the examples demonstrates that nobody non-blind and non-masochistic would use the Kindle 2 text-to-speech feature. And as blind people can't use the Kindle 2, what is the point of that feature - and of the Authors' Guild ruckus about it?

February 25, 2009. Text-to-speech (TTS) programs have been in use for a number of years, and they're improving. As Roy Blount says in an op-ed in today's New York Times, Kindle 2's TTS isn't Jim Dale reading "Harry Potter," but it's listenable. There's no need to take our word for it; have a listen to the sample below.