The Intel Reader is meant specifically for the blind or visually-impaired.

“We want people to experience the independence of being able to read on their own in a public place or anywhere they want to,” said [Intel representative Ben Foss], speaking at a press event on Monday. “A metaphor for this are the ramps that make buildings wheelchair accessible. This reader is like a ramp.”

The Intel Reader certainly goes farther than the Kindle toward assisting the blind. In fact, it was intentionally designed to enable full use by the visually-impaired with no additional help required. The packaging includes braille notation to identify the manuals, and a tutorial audio CD.

The Intel Reader has also been endorsed by a number of organizations dedicated to helping the blind or learning-disabled. The technical specs are impressive, and even at $1,500 it still costs considerably less than $10,000 braille readers.

It is interesting to consider that, for those who cannot read print themselves, the Intel Reader makes one of the great benefits of e-books available even for printed matter. Who knows; perhaps in a few years even ordinary e-book devices will be able to do something similar.

No, the TTS isn’t the equal of a human voice, especially one as memorable as that of Jim Dale, the Harry Potter narrator shown with actress Glenn Close.

Many have complained of the lack of inflection. Some have cited this as one reason for Amazon and others not to disable TTS to satisfy the whims of publishers. I myself think that playing text is fair use, just as large purple characters or a certain typeface would be.

In all honesty, however, the K2’s speech synthesis is far, far better than many other TTS systems. I can finally understand the speech with hardly any difficulty. And I suspect that the TTS is going to improve considerably in the future—a bit of a scary prospect since this could intensify opposition by certain publishers.

Pro-TTS legislation, please

That said, we really need to clarify the fair use aspect. Legislation, anyone? The irony is that publishers’ revenue might well increase with anti-TTS DRM banned by law. Audio book revenue is just a fraction of the industry total. TTS makes e-books much more useful for commuters, joggers and other exercisers—not just people with disabilities. What a boost TTS could give e-books!

Could it be that some publishers are less worried about revenue loss from TTS in particular and more about the rise of e-books in general?

Also of interest: Adobe/OverDrive e-book deal on hold at L.A. Public Library over text-to-speech controversy.

Hachette pretty much follows the Amazon position, saying that unless its authors object, it has no issue with adding TTS for the vast majority of its books. The only exceptions, HBG said, would be for “books that fall within our audio publishing program or specialized circumstances like memoirs, where the author or character’s voice is an artistic element of the work. Under such circumstances HBG reserves the right to request that the functionality be disabled.”

The statement said HBG arrived at its position have talking to the various parties interested in the issue. Hachette further noted that TTS “technology is likely to be a feature on an increasing number of devices in the coming months, and HBG recognizes the value of such functionality to individuals with impaired vision or similar disabilities.”

Recently I’ve been working on an ePub reader prototype. Once I’ve created a robust ePub ebook reader, I’m going to move this functionality into my text to speech application, Text2Go. My goal is provide a system that will convert an ebook to speech and transfer it to your iPod in a single click. This will allow any ePub formatted ebook to be turned into an audio book which can then be listened to while driving, walking, working out at the gym or any other activity where reading is impractical.

The focus of my ePub reader is quite different from the norm due to the fact that the recipient is not a human reader but a machine reader or computerized voice. A computerized voice cares nothing for fancy layouts, font selection or images. This makes my job a lot easier in many ways. However a computerized voice lacks one important skill a human reader uses frequently, often at a subconscious level. A computerized voice has no way of skimming over a section of text. For example, human readers will never read the same footer at the bottom of every page or meticulously read every page number. If this text is mixed in with the actual body of the story (usually as a result of some blind conversion process from a different ebook format to ePub), then the computerized voice will read this text in full on every page. This becomes incredibly irritating for the human listener.

At the suggestion of Peter Brantley of the Internet Archive, I offer up this Frequently Asked Questions for Authors regarding the Text To Speech (TTS) functionality that is the subject of debate. This may be an evolving document as more people provide input so that it adeqately addresses the issues. Please feel free to offer suggestions and/or revisions in the comments section.

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Q: I’ve heard that there is some debate over Kindle’s Text to Speech Function. What is it and should I be concerned?

A: When Amazon released it’s Kindle 2 in February, it announced that it had included the ability for every document/book/written work on the Kindle to be real aloud using a robotic voice (either girl or boy). You can hear a sample of it here as read by Wil Wheaton. The TTS functionality was switched “on” as a default. Author’s Guild objected to this on the basis that the right to read a book out loud was an audio right, a derivative right of authors under the Copyright Law.

After laying out why that function is not an infringement, or even if it is Amazon is the wrong one to complain about, Doctorow explains that the legality of read-aloud is irrelevant and what authors should be worrying about is Amazon’s ability to turn off features in the Kindle (that is, changing their mind and allowing publishers to choose to disable read-aloud for their books) after it has been shipped.

Writes Doctorow:

If I were running the Authors Guild, this would be my number one issue: we can’t afford to allow our books to be used to lure readers into purchasing devices that can turn against them. Because whatever bad feelings arise from this, some of them will surely be visited upon us.

While Doctorow writes with his usual cheerfully blatant hyperbole, he does point out an issue that readers of all DRM-locked e-books should bear in mind: the e-book seller, or the company that manages the e-book format if they’re not one and the same, can potentially do bad things to you after you invest in their product.

For example, the MobiPocket forums are full of posts like this one, in which a long-time MobiPocket user plaintively demands some way to read the expensive DRM-locked books he bought years ago on his new iPhone:

As you all should know – I am now unable to read my ebooks on my new device. I am very sad about this. Remember – I paid for them and now I can’t use them.

Would you please offer me a solution for this problem.

Everybody who ever bought protected Mobi books while owning a Palm but later bought an iPhone or Nokia Maemo tablet or Android device is in the same boat.

Ironically, the probable culprit here is also the hypothetical villain of Doctorow’s piece: Amazon.com. And if Amazon should ever stop licensing the Mobi DRM format to its competitors, everybody’s DRM’d MobiPocket books will vanish entirely*—just as Overdrive’s Fictionwise books did when Overdrive stopped doing business with Fictionwise.

The same dangers exist for every DRM-locked format, no matter how benevolent its present owners are. As Doctorow points out in his article, even a benign DRM-owner might be replaced if the company goes bankrupt or is sold to a new owner (as MobiPocket was bought by Amazon).

In the end, caveat emptor rules. The e-book buyer should beware, and reduce his dependency on and vulnerability to all DRM’d formats however he can. Otherwise, he may end up unpleasantly surprised.

*from the e-book sites that allow re-locking and re-download of MobiPocket books. The copies of the books that have already been downloaded will continue to work for all the devices to which they are currently DRM-locked, but cannot be re-locked to new devices.

(This reminds me of the flap caused by Adobe back in 2000 when the company released a PDF of Alice in Wonderland through Glassbook whose description included the line, “This book cannot be read aloud.” Some fraction of the Internet got up in arms over this, given that Alice in Wonderland was in the public domain—but it turned out to be a misunderstanding based on Adobe disabling use of a speech synthesizer function of Adobe Reader on that particular file.)

From one perspective, it is highly disappointing that publishers will be able to turn off a really handy feature that should be entirely legally permissible and is in no way a threat to professionally-produced audiobook recordings. But it is understandable that Amazon might not want to alienate publishers at this point. Hopefully the majority of publishers will take the sensible position that authors such as Cory Doctorow and Neil Gaiman have put forward—that the read-aloud feature is neither an infringement nor a threat.

Of course, if the stricture against reading aloud is enforced by DRM, all that a Kindle customer would need to do is offload the Kindle book onto his computer and use the tools that already exist for cracking Mobipocket DRM to get around that. (At least for the Kindle books that use the Mobipocket format.)

Regardless, the Pandora’s box of text-to-speech has been opened, and I would not be surprised if other e-book reader manufacturers included it in their machines as well. There is no guarantee those other manufacturers, or even Amazon, will be willing to listen to the Authors Guild forever.

Text-to Speech Peripheral Device

The Plustek BookReader features highly accurate OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and auto document orientation. This combination guarantees correct output for TTS (Text to Speech). You only need to press one button, and the Plustek Book Reader will convert printed text into high quality speech with a lifelike voice.

Plustek’s BookReader integrates high-speed scanning, natural voice synthesis (for read back) and highly accurate text-to-speech and optical character recognition (OCR) functionality, all in one device. Additional features, especially designed for the vision impaired, include: magnifying functions, font controls, volume controls, speech controls, bookmark functions, PDF reading, etc. All of them combined make BookReader a highly versatile computer companion.

The BookReader comes with OCR and text-to-speech (TTS) software. Both of them allow the scanner to copy and read the documents scanned.

To use these features, the user simply places a book or document on the scanning platen and, with the touch of one button, the book is scanned for one’s reading pleasure. With a single touch, the Book Reader transforms printed words into audio output which can be saved in MP3 format for archiving and later access.

Embedded OCR guarantees accurate scan results and allows the software to rotate disoriented text to generate a clearer message for the user. The unit comes with Plustek patented SEE Technology which uses a curved lamp to provide a clear scan of the book without distortion along the spine of big, bulky books.

Marilyn Byerly, writer and book doctor for established authors and a NY Times bestseller states in her Adventures in Writing blog: “The major legal problem with TTS is that it has never been clearly defined through a lawsuit or some other legal means. Right now, no one can say with legal certainty that TTS is a right on its own, a part of the audio rights, or part of the e-book rights.”

Marilyn’s excellent article on the subject can be found here.