AudioLark is being run by Jennifer Fedderson, a freelance editor who runs of the Best of the Best Ebook Contest at her website, along with Celia Kyle, a published author.

I wish them the best of luck and also note that they are hiring voice talent and audio editors.

No, people aren’t caught up in some romance novel, a thrilling mystery, a somber story, a dark satire, or a new novella. Rather, just one library user is in this vast empty space.

What can we do to encourage more people to enjoy books?

Here are two ideas—one pertaining to young people in general, and one for students with vision problems.

Why Johnny doesn’t want to read

A major reason why kids in my school won’t read books is that they think they are all written in old English, and that’s a shame. We could be using some good, modern books in the classroom.

A perfect example would be The Giver, or possibly The Fountainhead. I understand that teachers love all the literary elements used in Shakespeare works, and symbols behind everything, and I love them as well, but to the average reader, they are a tad hard to follow. By shoving them down our throats, aren’t educators creating a subtle hatred for the written word? Why not switch to modern literature, such as Sharon Draper books, Lois Lowery books, Margaret Peterson Haddix books, or possibly even some good old Dorothy Parker?

They all have literary elements to study, and some even have more than that. Great study guides could be derived from the books and be made into tests that most kids would be eager to pass. Is it so wrong to change a little with the times? Then maybe more literature lovers would blossom and bloom.

Another reason for apathy toward books—and one solution

Another reason for lack of interest in books, though this relates more to us blind and near-blind people, is that most English teachers have a massive fear of audio books. What if you had eye impairment and there weren’t any large print books in sight? I would pick up an audio book, but all my teachers, even at a blind school, would frown disapprovingly and scold me about how I can read so I don’t need or shouldn’t need audio.

Well, what if I’m an auditory learner and can retain things better that way? Why be afraid of a different medium? Open your heart and mind. Try having your class listen to Shakespeare rather than reading the text. You’re still getting the same information.

Related:  Why recreational reading counts, too—not just the kid for school and ‘A new assignment: Pick books you like.’

Editor’s note: These are Robert’s personal opinions. What do you think about them? I myself believe that we need a mix of classics and modern books. Good literature should challenge readers. But first get ‘em interested in books, period. Robert’s big concerns are right on the mark. – D.R.

Looking at the OverDrive site, you can find the link to the Windows Mobile application on the right hand side of the page, under the Windows Mobile category. Unfortunately the page gives no information about the application itself.  Also, Windows Mobile is rapidly losing its already small market share to Symbian and the iPhone, so hopefully OverDrive will come out with something for the majority of the market. Here’s a slightly edited excerpt from an OverDrive news release:

OverDrive…announced the release of the first in a series of free digital book applications for mobile devices. OverDrive® Media Console™ for Windows Mobile® enables users with Windows Mobile phones to wirelessly download audiobooks, music, and video to their devices and play the titles with the same superior navigation features of OverDrive’s desktop software. To view a list of supported devices including Sprint Palm Treo™, AT&T Samsung Jack™, and Verizon HTC Touch Pro™, go here.

KM: For those readers who don’t know about it yet, can you give us the elevator speech version of what Book Oven is, and what it does?

HM: We’re calling it "cloud-publishing," an online space to create, collaborate on, and sell books and e-books.

Most of these tools exist, of course, in various forms already. You can collaborate with editors and proofreaders on a wiki or Google Docs, you can find other writers or editors on various writers’ forums. You can generate an ePub ebook using various tools, and you can make a PDF and send it to Lulu, or CreateSpace, and sell your book print-on-demand through your own site, or through online book retailers; you can sell your e-books on Smashwords, or Amazon’s Kindle store, or at Shortcovers.

But, we want to put all that together so that writers, editors, and designers can focus on the really important stuff: the content. So we’re building a set of Web tools, and a community, that will allow writers, editors, proofreaders and designers to work on a book, and get it into the hands (or devices) of readers.

How people organize themselves in Book Oven is up to them: small private groups of colleagues; open groups of strangers; people who work together out of interest in a particular book or topic, or people who find each other through a marketplace for services.

We’re just getting started, and we’ve built the basics of this platform. But as we move forward, we really need feedback from writers and editors and proofreaders and designers about what an ideal working space would look like, dedicated to making books.

We’re lucky in that we come at this entirely from the view of the Web. I’ve been working for a long time on LibriVox.org, an open model for audiobook publishing that’s been a great success. My partner-in-crime and Book Oven co-founder, Stephanie Troeth, has been building big Web sites for more than a decade, and is deeply involved in the global Web standards communities. So we’re looking at the problem of book publishing entirely from the perspective of people of the Web, which means we see very different things than traditional publishers do. But our team is made up of readers, and writers—we love books, words, literature, writing, libraries—all that good stuff—and so this is an exciting project to work on. We get to re-imagine what bookmaking will look like as the world becomes more connected, which is I think one of the most fascinating problems to be wrestling with.

Hmm. Let’s just imagine that was a really long elevator ride!

KM: Where did the idea for Book Oven come from? Was it a natural outgrowth of your work with Librivox, or was it sparked by some other event?

HM: When I "rediscovered" the Web in 2004 (I mean, when I started participating in creation on the Web, rather than just consuming), I was absolutely giddy with two things:

• The free software/open source movement.
• Free tools for making media, and distributing it to the world.

The free software movement provided this fascinating study in a new model for organizing groups of people around complex problems, and solving them, with the initial capital investment taken out of the equation. It’s not that money was irrelevant, but that groups of people who wanted to solve particular problems suddenly had the means—especially as the web became more accessible – to self-organize to get the stuff done. What was so thrilling to me about this model is that it was so successful in making great stuff: Linux, Firefox, WordPress, etc. And more, it meant that the tools to make things were floating around all over the web, and you could use bits of one tool, or another and put them together to build something you needed.

I was very curious about how that could be applied to problems other than software.

The other parts of the equation were the tools for making and distributing media: blogging, podcasting, YouTube etc. I’ve always felt that creation is the most rewarding act someone can engage in, even more so if that creation can be shared with the world. LibriVox took those ideas, and tools and applied them to the creation of free public domain audiobooks. At some point I realized that what we had really done was build an audiobook publishing "company" (totally non-profit, of course), that had flourished and produced this amazing body of work, because we had made it easy for people to do something they wanted to do: create audiobooks, and share them with the world. We were, I realized, a publishing "company" whose true "clients" were the producers of audiobooks, and by focusing our attention on them, we’d seen a wonderful flourishing of content that never would have been available otherwise. But we didn’t do anything very fancy, we just pulled existing tools together, and built a community around a specific purpose: making public domain audiobooks. The results were, really, pretty astounding.

I’ve always loved books, and writing, and fiction. At one point I wrote a novel, and when I was trying to get it published, I was amazed at the publishing industry: it was byzantine and opaque, and hard to figure out. And everything seemed set up to make things difficult. Of course there are reasons for that: agents and publishers get flooded with manuscripts, and by one study anyway, there are more aspiring book writers in the US than there are readers of books. But of course the web has shown that when there is demand for something— in this case, getting your book published— it will find a way to flow around all the blockages.

The tools are there already: you can publish your books on Lulu or elsewhere, and companies like Smashwords make it easy to publish and sell you e-books. But these solutions looked to me much like the public domain audiobook problem before LibriVox. The tools existed, but someone needed to bring together a community, and make those tools easier to use in order for a real public domain audiobook publishing model to emerge. And, in the case of books, the real problem is not so much publishing a book—anyone can do that— but publishing a good book. Publishing the best book you can. That takes time, and input from others—editors and proofreaders and the like.

With Book Oven, we are building a place for that kind of collaboration to happen, and then an easy way to convert the final product into an e-book or book-book, and sell it on the web. And that’s an important distinction between LibriVox and Book Oven: while LibriVox is explicitly a non-commercial project that produces free audiobooks, at Book Oven, the decisions about how work on a book gets organized, and what happens afterward is up to the writer, or whoever “owns” the project. There is nothing explicitly non-commercial about Book Oven, and we expect to see lots of commercial activity around the books produced there.

We want to make it easy to make, and sell books—and so we see this a new model for publishing of all kinds.

KM: BookOven is your second (that I know of) project that is relies heavily upon crowdsourcing. What draws you to community collaboration projects? What do you love most about the model, and are there any drawbacks?

HM: First, I really don’t like the term "crowdsourcing." I don’t think it’s reflective of the most interesting kinds of collaboration on the web. My real interest is in how the Web has enabled groups of people to work together in new ways to solve complex problems. Crowdsourcing has this really strange connotation—basically of "cheap labour"—which isn’t interesting to me at all. Yochai Benkler uses the term "commons-based peer production," which is closer maybe. Projects like Wikipedia you might call "mass collaboration." But that doesn’t really hit my real interest either.

If you look at LibriVox, it’s actually a very structured kind of collaboration. The output is fixed (a faithful rendition of a text in audio), and a small group of people—readers, coordinators, prooflisteners, and catalogers—decide to work together in a very specific way in order to make an audiobook happen. This kind of collaboration was impossible before the Web, which is why it’s exciting. But LibriVox isn’t crowdsourcing, and it’s not really mass collaboration either. Commons-based peer production? Maybe.

The key is the way the Web enables groups of people to work together in new ways. They might be strangers, might know each other, might be aligned with commercial interest, or might just feel like working on something together because it interests them; that’s what’s exciting. Innovation comes when you get rid of friction points that prevent people from working together, and find ways to make sure that there are incentives (monetary, reputational, artistic, social etc) for people to work together.

Book Oven is going to be a different kind of challenge than LibriVox. With LibriVox there was very much a "do good for the world" incentive among the participants (although there are many other reasons people participate in LibriVox). With Book Oven we need to allow for a wider range of incentives—personal, artistic, financial, and more. We need to build a kind of space where there is both a sense of greater purpose (building a new, more flexible publishing model), and clear reasons why writers and editors and proofreaders and designers might want to join. Some reasons might be: to work on books people wouldn’t get to work on professionally; because they get a financial stake in the sales of the book; for straight fees; out of interest in a topic; or to support other writers, friends, colleagues. So again, calling it "crowdsourcing" doesn’t really do justice to what we expect to see in Book Oven.

After all that rambling, I should admit that Bite-Size Edits, our proofreading game/tool is closer to "crowdsourcing." Or can be anyway. It works like this:

• You upload a text.
• Your text gets chopped up into sentences.
• Those sentences get served at random to proofreaders (though you retain control over what edits get accepted/modified/rejected; you also can control who those proofreaders are).
• Once all the sentences have been edited, the system reassembles your text in the right order.

And you can use Bite-Size as a true, er, crowdsourcing tool, allowing the masses to edit your text; or you can use it with a small group of private editors, or just yourself.

KM: Is Book Oven set up to create any sort of hierarchy as one would find in the traditional publishing house (e.g.: Senior editors, editors-in-chief, etc.)? In other words, who gets final say on edits and other components of the book?

HM: Book Oven is about giving groups of people the tools to collaborate on the creation, and publishing of a book. How those groups organize themselves will be entirely up to them. Some *might* organize as truly open crowdsourcing book projects. Many will not, and there will be a writer, editor, proofreader, designer—just as there is in a publishing house. But, I hope that we’ll also see small presses using Book Oven— because it’s an easier, more structured tool set to make a book in the digital age. In fact, I’d like to see many new kinds of small presses and collectives evolving using tools like Book Oven, with all sorts of different structures.

In short, we’re totally agnostic about how people organize themselves around books in Book Oven. We just want lots of people to make (and sell!) lots of great books.

KM: When a Book Oven book is completed, is it available for sale? In what formats?

HM: We’re not quite there yet, but eventually we’ll have a Book Oven store where you can sell your books, and we’ll plug in with other online retailers (say, Smashwords, Amazon, Shortcovers etc), so you can easily sell your books there too. We’re also agnostic about formats, we’ll get them into whatever formats we can: e-book, Web/HTML, and print-on-demand. Right now you can produce ePubs, unformatted PDF, and html. But again, we’re totally agnostic about it, and would like to support whatever formats people want to read in.

KM: Book Oven is currently open to the public – anyone can upload content and make it available to others to edit and proofread. What kind of revenue model do you anticipate? Will you be selling the completed books? If so, how is the profit shared (do those who have worked on editing/proofing the book get any of the profit)?

HM: The main part of our revenues come from taking a small cut of books sold, though we have a few other revenue hooks as well. We have not fixed our pricing yet, but I will say that I’m … surprised … by the profit splits offered by a certain unnamed online book retail giant for e-books. I am a big fan of Smashwords and their pricing scheme, (15% to Smashwords, 85% to author/publisher). It makes much more sense to me.

Book Oven will only be successful if bookmakers are happy, and the more money we can put in their pockets, the better for everyone.

As for how in-project revenue sharing will happen, we’re not there yet. But I would imagine there will be a few models including assigning a % of profits to your project team. That will have to evolve with the desires of community however; and there are slightly scary tax and accounting implications to be worked through as well.

KM: What other possibilities do you see for Book Oven? Will you be offering enterprise versions for traditional/for-profit publishers?

HM: I think in the next couple of years, we’re more likely to be useful for the odd "maverick editor" than we are to sell enterprise versions of Book Oven to Random House and HarperCollins.

We do expect smaller presses to be interested in using our tools, though, and eventually we’d like to offer customized versions to publishers. But that, too, is away down the line.

KM: What do you like to read, and how?

HM: I’m a literary fiction kind of guy. Lately I’ve been reading big, old, public domain books on my iphone (using Stanza). If you can believe it, I read War and Peace and Moby Dick that way, and I’m currently reading The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford (what a wonderful book that is, by the way). I also have stacks of book books all over the place, and for modern writers I like (somewhat at random): John Banville, Miriam Toews, Murakami, Nabokov, Jeanette Winterson, Pynchon, Nicholson Baker, Gunter Grass, Toni Morrison … and on and on.

I should say I am voracious Web reader—of all sorts of things, most recently I’ve been ingesting great quantities of book blogs, and writings about the collapse of media as we knew it. Oh, I read the odd Twitter post too.

A little more on Hugh: He co-founded Book Oven with Stephanie Troeth. In addition, he writes for the Huffington Post about digital media and publishing, is on the Advisory Board of the Conversations Network, and is Past-President of the Board of Directors of the Atwater Library, Canada’s last remaining Mechanic’s Institute. He lives in Montreal, and writes frequently on the Book Oven Blog and less frequently on his own site.

The sad truth is that many e-books are not very useful for the visually impaired.

I have come across numerous instances where I can’t even read a book, let alone navigate it. And here I’m supposed to study it for class!

Blah! All I can do is hunt, peck, and, yes, even beg in some cases for another format of the same book. PDFs can be like potluck. I’ll be lucky if I can even read one line.

Stay tuned, however. I’ll tell you about WebbIE’s free “Accessible PDF Reader”—which may help, at least with nonDRMed e-books. The developers describe WebbIE as “a Web browser for blind and visually impaired people.” A small screenshot appears below, and a larger one is at the end of this past.

What it’s like being me

I’ll be in 12th grade in high school this year, and I love books—just so I can read them with my eye condition, which is something called retinopathy, arising from a premature birth. I can see only in one eye; it has tunnel vision.

If you don’t know what the heck I’m talking about, make a C around your left eye, and cover the other eye completely. And presto, you’re me!

With this issue come smaller ones, also annoying. I can’t read a regular book unless my nose and it are meeting face to face, even with a magnifier. That’s why I live on the computer, or just get audio books.

Limited audiobook choices

However. I can’t find everything in print in audio. A good example would be the Darren Shan series. There is no audio version of that here in the United States, and I can’t get it through National Library Service for the Blind, so it kind of irks my tidy mind when someone says it’s the best book that I will ever read, if I can. I love how he puts the “if I can” part in there. Makes me feel so much better. It is as if I smelled a delicious candy bar but couldn’t buy it because the store wouldn’t take my money.

Hopes dashed: No vampire story, just gibberish

I looked for an eBook version of the Darren Shan series, and lots popped up like bunny rabbits.

I downloaded a copy from eBooks.com and opened it up with Adobe Reader. My screen reader, JAWS 9.0, a text-to-speech program that sounds like a robot to those who are not used to it, said blank when I first opened it up. I thought it was just the cover page. It was. With my nose pressed to the screen, I tried the next page where I could see some text.

So I pressed the down arrow, but instead of hearing “my name is Darren Shan, and I’m a vampire, all I heard was blank, blank, blank, blank. I also heard, “Unlabeled graphic =+36756? 4. Image.gif.”

Wow! I didn’t know that was there! This book was really getting good! I tried exporting it as a text file which you can do in Adobe Reader within the File menu, and I opened up the text file ready to dive into some spooky story. I tried pressing the down arrow, and heard nothing. All I heard was blank, blank, blank. I half expected my computer to say “nothing’s there. Ding bat. Stop pounding on me.” But it didn’t, and I did a search for a different novel.

Tangling with Adobe Reader

This one I could read, but not post to a text file so I can easily navigate it. I had to fight with Adobe to just make it read the table of contents. I kept pressing the down arrow, reading line by line, and not by paragraph like I could have done if I had it in a plain text version.

This soon grew so frustrating I just deleted the book altogether. Also, all the unlabeled images and all the weird graphics in the book were honestly giving me a headache. I didn’t like hearing image.567.gif, and untitleddarrenshanimage=67.gif. I vowed never to read e-books again!!

WebbIE to the rescue

I did read a e-book the next day, and it was the Darren Shan series. I did it with the help of WebbieIE’s “Accessible PDF” part of the accessible programs package. When I saw this on Google, I wanted to race outside in my underpants! Oh my god! Could this be my solution?

I downloaded it here and installed it.  Even my sweat was sweating when I fired up the program and tried to open a PDF with it. It worked! I saw text on the screen, but was it like my math paper? Did it have jumbled numbers or did it have actual words? I tried pressing the down arrow to hear the first line. It read it without any issues.

Easy to use

Accessible PDF is actually the simplest thing you can ever come across. It also works in high contrast; so if you, like me, want to have black text on white, shoot! If you want to have white text on black, shoot as well. Well, obviously not at me, but shoot all the same.

The program is actually simpler in terms of navigation than in Adobe Reader. All the menus are nicely laid out at the top of the window, and you can change the font size and color. It is, like my sister’s room, very clean and organized; and like my brain, it works all the time.

Don’t get me wrong. I have complaints about Accessible PDF, and it won’t make the whole PDF accessible—well, it will, but some part has to be done by the author.

Unfortunately many authors are so afraid that by opening PDF’s to accessibility, they also open them up to copyright issues. Well, no, duh, but that’s what courts and lawyers are for.

For example in accessible PDF, I don’t know why, but the Darren Shan’s books were not formatted right. I tried reading by paragraph but it skipped like twenty pages, and it went to ends of books in some cases.

So this is how I had to read this fast-paced book…

He ran to the
House
And found something
That resembled
A pee.

Imagine putting pauses every time there was a new paragraph. Gosh! Boring, right? I want to have a book be at least as interesting as my feet. I guess I shouldn’t complain; but then again I wouldn’t have to be reading like this if authors would make their e-books accessible in the first place.

I don’t know what Accessible PDF looks like since I have my whole computer in high contrast mode. This makes it easier to see what’s on the screen.

How Accessible PDF could be still better

Accessible PDF is great over-all, but in some ways it irks me.

No reflow function! In Adobe there is something called reflow, under view mode that makes the text wrap all the way to one side of the document. If it’s allowed to do it anyway. I have only come across like seven out of the 56 books I downloaded  which had this feature. It was great since I had a high magnification.

Another shortcoming is that you have to open a PDF file within the application. My dog and I are too lazy to do that.

Won’t convert images to text

That’s about all that’s wrong with this application except it won’t convert images to text. If an author of an e-book has provided Alt text descriptions to images, then it will just look like another paragraph, but if they don’t you wouldn’t even know it’s there. I guess this is a good thing, but still, I just wanted to toss that up in the air.

The application can even read documents from Web pages, but I have never gotten this feature to work at all. I had to fill up my hard drive with e-books.

It’s easy to navigate through the program with just the keyboard and the buttons and stuff are labeled and everything. I loved this thing so much I actually planned a wedding date for the two of us.

Should make blind people jump and scream in delight

This simple little program will make blind people jump and scream in delight no matter how careless the author is towards the blind and or disabled. It will make many little, old, and big girls and boys squeal like cheerleaders. It may even make things better on some sighted people as well.

This program still has some minor bugs and glitches, doesn’t have as many features as it could have, and is hard to find on the Web, but it sure did make me want to run with glee outside in my underpants. This will be the program that will break down the walls of bad PDF tagging, and open a door that I’m sure never occurred to the authors mind. It also would be a good marketing tool for authors as well if they want to get their e-books sold or distributed to a wide verity of people.

That being said, not all PDF’s will open, and that is due to the bad tagging in the documents. Gosh. Do we honestly have to fight so hard for equal access to books? I mean it’s kind of sad that a completely different program has to be made, distributed, and downloaded just so that blind people can read PDF’s. In my book that’s awfully pathetic.

Like a Life Saver, this program is sweet, good, and it’s long lasting. Will it be better in the near future? Will it be the main tool used for PDF’s in the future? Will I ever get married? Who knows, but checking out this program is definitely a start.

Screenshot One

This shot is of Accessible PDF Reader displaying a document with a normal font and contrast.

Screenshot Two

Here we see Accessible PDF showing a document with high contrast, yellow text on black, in a regular window.

Robert’s Bio

“My eye condition came from being born prematurely in the New York reign of this world. With that also came the added burden of cerebral palsy, known as CP. My grandmother and grandfather, who took care of me for most of my life, then heard about a school for the blind here in Florida called the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind. I have been going there for thirteen years, and my mind has been warped as a result!

“In my spare time I write stories. I am an aspiring author. One of the places where you can find and read and review my work even if you do not have an account is at Fiction press. I host a podcast called the 4 Yo information podcast. And I also do another podcast called the Accessibility in Mind Podcast. “

Total revenue from the 30 companies that report figures to the Audio Publishers Association fell 6.7% in 2008, to $331 million, the trade association said Tuesday. The sales figure compares to the $172 million sales estimates released by the AAP and the $229 million estimate of the PW/IPR sales index. This is the first time the APA has released actual sales figures from its members.

CDs continued to comprised the largest share of the spokenword market, although its share fell from 78% in 2007 to 72% in 2008, or about $238 million. Digital downloads accounted for 21% of sales last year–$69.5 million–compared to 17% of revenue in 2007. Sales of pre-loaded audio devices rose from 1% of sales in 2007 to 3% last year, the same percentage as accounted for by cassettes.

Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, academic, entrepreneur, and author Ann Kirschner asks, “Do I love books or do I love reading?”—in light of the ever-expanding publishing universe.

For me and probably most readers, it’s an easy question to answer: reading. I don’t much care how my reading comes as long as it’s written well. Kirschner wasn’t sure. So she decided to conduct an experiment, reading Dickens’ masterwork Little Dorrit four ways: paperback, audiobook, Kindle, and iPhone.

“Little Dorrit was an accidental choice, but I could hardly have done better. Its length, multiple story lines, 19th-century allusions, and teeming cast of characters helped me to test the functionality of different formats. Beyond the artifice of my reading experiment, though, please don’t think that technology compromised my ability to appreciate this beloved novel, written in 1857 at the height of Dickens’s power and popularity. Just the opposite.”

She starts with the requisite warmed-over nostalgia for paperbacks: “How dare we think that anything could replace it? Impossible to imagine that any of these newfangled devices could last nearly 40 years. The perfume of old paper filled the air.” I would have clicked onwards had she gone no further. But instead she ventured on to audiobooks.

Audiobooks are wonderful in all the situations she describes, walking, driving, sitting in the dentist’s chair. But I can’t imagine how many hours this 1000-page plus books would consume listened to in its entirety. And audiobooks practically require you multitask. The painfully slow pace of spoken stories becomes apparent if you’re not, say, cooking; you don’t pull up an easy chair next to the fireplace and curl up with your MP3 player.

Doesn’t mince words

Which leaves the Kindle and iPhone. Kirschner doesn’t mince words:

“I’ve been dreading this, but let me get my prediction out now: The iPhone is a Kindle killer. I abandoned the Kindle edition of Little Dorrit almost as soon as I read one chapter on my iPhone. Kindle, shmindle. It does almost nothing that an iPhone can’t do better — and most important, the iPhone is always with me. Woody Allen had it right: Seventy percent of success in life is showing up.”

Now I don’t have an iPhone, so I can’t really comment. But insofar as she goes, I imagine she’s right. However. I think of the easy chair in the fireplace’s vicinity. At the risk of reveal a Luddite streak, I just can’t see curling up with a … glowing phone.

Why I prefer the Kindle over the iPhone for curling up with a book

Whereas I happily sink into reading oblivion via my Kindle at every opportunity. However, I bet if I actually had an i-something, I probably could do the same. And as Kirschner points out:

“Middle-aged readers think that the dimension of the screen is critical. It’s not: The members of the generation that grew up playing Game Boys and telling time on their cellphones will have absolutely no problem reading from a small screen. Let us pray that they will. Right now, they aren’t buying Kindles — and they aren’t reading books.”

I don’t worry about this. I think there will be plenty of readers in the future. Just not ones very much like the ones we’ve got today. They won’t feel any compunction about curling up with their i-device anywhere. Which is great. It’s the words, the style, the story that matters. Not the format it appears in. Which is a point Kirschner offers a sly insight on: “My personal theory is that Amazon cares less about our choice of screen than our choice of store. Amazon wants Kindle to be a verb, not a noun, as in "I Kindled that book," which could mean that I read it on a smartphone, computer, or dedicated electronic-book device.”

English Language will survive

I suspect she’s right. Which would be perfectly fine with me. The English language seems to be surviving the Facebook-enabled verbing of “friend”, so I bet it could take a “Kindling”. As long as Dickensian journeys keep on starting with "Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun. …", I don’t think it much matters how they get there.

Related: Paul Biba’s pickup of a passage from the Chronicle of Higher Education and ‘Little Dorrit’ enjoyed via the Kindle and oherwise: ‘On the Media’ follows up with Ann Kirschner (my post). Also see Court’s reflection’s on Little Dorrit as a book. You can download Little Dorrit for free from Feedbooks.

So how does the Kindle version compare with the same Dickens masterpiece as read via a p-book, audio book and iPhone? Check out an On the Media segment. The iPhone, by the way, fared pretty well. For example, you can always carry it with you (easier for many people than with a Kindle).

Paul pointed earlier to these results as conveyed in in text, but OTM’s audio interview with Ann Kirschner is still worth listening to—if nothing else, then for her conjecture on Dickens as an audiobook narrator, based on his lectures in actual life. “Dickens performed his books. He’d love the audiobook format. He stood in front of a stage and brought people to tears—reading his books…Can you imagine to have a recording of Dickens reading Little Dorrit? It would be amazing.”

Related: The Kirschner Web site, source of the above image.

Big thanks to librarian Tom Peters, the narrator, who’ll be leading a discussion of this Washington suspense novel at 9 p.m. on July 21 for Online Programming for All Libraries. If you’re blind or otherwise print-challenged, you can catch up with Tom for the rest of the installments as they become available. Meanwhile you can read a text overview of Scandals as well as a list of the characters.

Note: The download address may change. Check solomonscandals.com if the current one does not work.

Special offer to all librarians: Contact me for permission to make your own recordings of the first part of Scandals. In addition, I can arrange for you to record the rest of the book for disabled patrons, at no charge. I may extend the “first hour” part of the offer to nonlibrarians, but am starting with librarians, given my interest in library advocacy.

OverDrive (www.overdrive.com) today announced that digital audiobook catalogs from leading publishers will be compatible with iPod® and other Apple® devices after a simple upgrade of OverDrive’s free, easy-to-use audiobook software. Starting in mid-June, millions of new and existing users with Windows® PCs will be able to install OverDrive Media Console version 3.2 with enhanced transfer functionality for iPod, iPhone™, iPod touch®, and iPod nano®, as well as Zune® and thousands of other portable devices. Participating publishers include Random House Audio, Hachette Audio, Penguin Audio, BBC Audiobooks America, Brilliance Audio, Tantor Media, and many more.

OverDrive Media Console’s enhanced Transfer Wizard will expand the largest selection of iPod-compatible audiobook titles for libraries by making the vast majority of existing audiobook titles on library download websites playable on Apple® devices. Retail customers at Borders.com, www.WHSmith.co.uk, and BooksOnBoard.com will also benefit from the free upgrade. Best sellers such as Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight,” Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers,” John Grisham’s “The Appeal,” and Chuck Palahniuk’s “Pygmy” from libraries and retailers in OverDrive’s global network will become iPod-compatible downloads, along with highly-anticipated releases like Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol” and Tami Hoag’s “The Trouble with J.J.”

“iPod-compatibility instantly adds value to digital media catalogs powered by OverDrive and further expands the collection to the millions of iPod owners eager to download from the library,” said David Burleigh, director of marketing for OverDrive. “A simple software upgrade is all it takes to allow the transfer of thousands of additional bestsellers to the popular media player.”

Once OverDrive Media Console version 3.2 is installed, most titles in a library’s OverDrive WMA Audiobook collection will instantly become iPod-compatible for users with Windows PCs. The growing collection of iPod-compatible, Mac®-friendly OverDrive MP3 Audiobooks will still be available to help libraries better serve patrons with Apple computers.

eMusic, the internet’s corner music store and the first retailer to sell digital audiobooks in the MP3 format, today announced that its audiobook catalogue has surpassed 7,000 titles

Audiobook fans can now purchase DRM-free versions of Alexander McCall Smith books, including The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, William P. Young’s The Shack, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and No Country for Old Men, Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, and Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire series upon which HBO’s “True Blood” is based. Other authors new to eMusic audiobooks include Arianna Huffington, Haven Kimmel, David Denby, Yann Martel, and Joyce Carol Oates.
The expanded catalogue is a result of new agreements to sell DRM-free audiobooks from Recorded Books, the world’s largest independent publisher and distributor of unabridged audio books, and Minnesota-based HighBridge Audio. Other publishers recently added to the eMusic roster include personal development book publishers Sounds True and Gildan Media; Christian audiobooks publisher Oasis Audio, andaward-winning, PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group.

Since the launch of eMusic audiobooks, subscribers have downloaded more than a quarter million audiobooks. In addition, over a 12-month time span, 89.3% of the catalogue has been downloaded, illustrating both the power of the long tail as it pertains to books, and the viability of the medium for publishers.
“As more publishers choose to sell their audiobooks DRM-free, they validate what we’ve proven since eMusic launched in 1998 – customers want to be able to own their recorded content in the format of their choice and play it on the device of their choice,” said Rob Wetstone, eMusic VP of Content. “These new catalogues are excellent additions to eMusic’s audiobook service and we remain committed to expanding the market for DRM-free audiobooks.”

But meanwhile some people could be suffering besides the sight-impaired: authors and publishers. Why?  Because the TTS turnoff is aimed at e-books, one of the fastest-growing segments of the book business.

Consider this. Audiobook sales fell 21 percent from $218 milllion in 2007 to $172 million in 2008. By contrast, e-book sales jumped 68 percent from $67 million to $113 million. So here’s the question. Could better e-book tech and a wider range of titles be eating into audiobook sales? And just as importantly, given E’s growth, mightn’t Random House and others actually hurt themselves and their authors by turning off text to speech in the cases of at least some Kindle books? Questions like those emerge directly or indirectly in an iReader post based on AAP stats, and I think it’s on target.

Here’s one angle. More and more Americans will be vision-impaired as the Baby Boomers age. So in shutting off TTS, writers and publishers aren’t just setting back their PR. They may be inflicting some nasty damage to earnings from e-books that the sight-impaired might otherwise be buying.

Remember, Fictionwise, its recent acquisition, vastly prefers that publishers not use DRM—a sales toxin, since “protection” makes it more difficult to own e-books for use on a variety of devices.

Speaking of DRM, has anyone noticed what a high percentage of Fictionwise’s nonfiction is “protected”? Why? Do publishers spend more on individual nonfiction titles and thus feel more of an urge to DRM ‘em. Big mistake. Web sites’ quotes from nonfiction might be especially good for sale, and copy-and-paste within the bounds of fair use could help.

(B&N press release here, via Joanna Penn.)