I was going to participate in nanowrimo this year. But due to life and just getting tied up in other things I decided to not do so. I am really just not ready to write anything novel based right now. So my apologies to those who expected something.
Kindle and Accessibility and Books and Reading
This is what my post primarily is about. I just got a kindle keyboard this week as an early birthday present and I absolutely love it. The built in text to speech is amazing although I wish Amazon would make other things accessible to the blind like browsing the store through the kindle web browser. But seriously I have really just about adopted the kindle as my only book reading solution. There are tons of books available for free out there that I can load up into this thing without spending another penny if I want. But I will buy books I am interested in. For anyone who isn’t familiar with the blind you must understand that ibooks on the iphone. Or the half way accessible kindle to the blind is a huge step out of the dark ages. Well, hmmm, maybe not dark ages. But for us seriously we just haven’t had this ability for a long time. I read many times people fussing about apple ibook and Amazon kindle book prices that I almost want to take all those fussing and complaining by the back of their necks and shake some sense into them. For me as just one blind person. I can find plenty of free and low cost books on amazon and other sources to last me a life time and longer so I am not complaining. For those of you seeking free books or low cost books. Subscribe to amazon’s daily deal for one. Two amazon has about 100 books a month that you can look through and pick titles you are interested in. I got some books for under 4 dollars about 5 of them from this months offering and saved approximately 20 or more dollars on each of those books Third there are plenty of websites like gutenberg and feedbooks and manybooks and others that offer free reading material a lot of which in my opinion anyway is a lot better than most new books out there today so give them a try and stop fussing for those of you who are. Same goes for people fussing about ibook prices on apple. Again search for the deals they are plainly available right in front of you. I have for the most part adopted the kindle as my book reader. But I don’t exclude ibooks. Both are good for book reading. And both stores have deals. I just like how amazon does their book selections better. I can’t tell you how many people have said to me once I got the kindle that they love the kindle because they can turn text to speech on and listen to a book in the car on their way to work. I am sure half or most of these people don’t know that is mostly a result of blind person getting upset with amazon for not making the kindle accessible to everyone. Well to Amazon keep up the accessibility please. It will increase your sales more than you know and it will help tons more people than you may realize and get more features available to those of us without sight so that we can read books even better than we already do those of us currently using kindle. Take care everyone.
Yiskalyn's Thoughts 