The Biblio Files's Open Salon Blog

Kindle's Robot Voice

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 02:02:09 -0500

Ever hear a computerized voice mail system? You can't mistake it for a real person. Maybe just for a second, if you're not paying attention.

The text-to-speech feature of the Kindle reader sounds like that.

When the Kindle 2 came out about a year ago, some publishers were sure Amazon was trying to do an end run around them by allowing their digital books to be read with that robot voice. The publishers thought that readers would stop buying professionally recorded audiobooks if they could listen to books with computerized speech instead.

I've had my Kindle for almost a year and I use the text-to-speech feature occasionally, when I'm in the middle of a good book and have to do something that precludes reading, like ironing. Ten or twenty minutes is the most I can listen to the synthetic voice. Or iron, for that matter.

The voice itself isn't terribly distracting, although it does read everything in the same monotone, regardless of what's happening in the story. The distractions for me are the robot's pronunciations. For instance, I am reading a gossipy book about the 2008 presidential campaign, Game Change. I am pleased to find that since last summer when I read Renegade: The Making of a President, the robot has learned that “Obama” doesn't rhyme with “Alabama.”

Robot Gone Bad: "Open the iPod bay doors, Hal."

The robot doesn't know the difference between the past and present tense of “read,” and sometimes gets it wrong. It pronounces “wound” the same way, whether it's a war wound or tightly wound. And the stress on “record” is on the second syllable whether it's to record a message or about setting an Olympic record.

Text-to-speech technology is getting better. Nuance, the company that provides Kindle's voices (there's a male and a female voice ) also has voices in various languages with a variety of accents. Here's a few samples.

English Australian Karen

English English Daniel

English Indian Sangeeta

English Irish Moira

English Scottish Fiona

English South African Tessa

English U.S. Tom

They sound pretty good compared to this AT&T demo, in which you can enter whatever text you like and it reads it back to you.

While the currently available text-to-speech technology isn't up to the standard of The Royal Shakespeare Company, it's not bad for this version of a scene from Star Trek: Wrath of Khan, performed by a Kindle and an iPod.

Batgirl Was a Librarian

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:02:52 -0500

Librarian as Superhero

Publisher Harper Collins has just released a new book – about librarians. Talk about optimistic.

This Book is Overdue! by Marilyn Johnson, and it describes the exciting new world of librarians. Tattoos, precision drills using tricked-out book carts, and the virtual reality of Second Life figure prominently. Naturally, I liked the book, but is it possible for a book about librarians to be a money-maker for Harper Collins?

It's a very positive book, filled with enthusiastic librarians who love to acquire, store, and especially share, information. They are privacy rights activists, ardent bloggers, and street librarians. It was fun reading about these exuberant professionals. Librarians aren't what they used to be.

Neither are libraries. Libraries and other “non-essential” public services are getting hit hard in these tough economic times. And yet they keep finding new ways to serve their communities. Here are a few examples:

Drive-up windows. They started popping up about two years ago and now there's no stopping them. Reserve a book or DVD online and pick it up at the drive-up window.

Arlington Heights, IL library drive-up window

Borrow a Kindle. Or a Sony Reader. A few public libraries (and some university libraries) are lending e-readers. People are borrowing them to read bestsellers or textbooks or just to try them out before deciding whether to buy one. This seems like such a good idea, I can't believe Amazon isn't jumping all over it and donating Kindles to public and academic libraries already.

Digital readers aren't the only cool things libraries are lending, aside from the usual books, CDs, DVDs, video games, and laptops. Forward-thinking libraries are lending GPS units, fishing poles, gardening tools, museum passes, and cake pans.

Donate a book. Attacking their financial problems head on, some libraries are coming up with clever and creative fundraising ideas. Several are maintaining wish lists of items that anyone can purchase and donate directly from Amazon. The Santa Cruz Public Libraries go a step further and have created wish lists with local independent bookstores. The Monterey County Free Libraries have received over fifty book donations from their Amazon wish list in one year, plus assorted DVDs, CDs, and language courses.

Libraries and librarians are morphing like superheroes, keeping the Evil Budget Shrinker at bay. Don't underestimate them. Remember, Batgirl was a librarian.

Librarian as a different kind of fantasy figure

Accept No Substitutes

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:02:20 -0500

Does every new humor writer have to be described as “the new David Sedaris”? Maybe I should be pleased we've moved on – it used to be every new humor writer was “the new Bill Bryson.” Or “the new Dave Barry.” Before that it was Erma Bombeck.

I like David Sedaris. And Bill Bryson and Dave Barry and Erma Bombeck. If I want to read their very distinctive styles of humor, I'll read the real thing. I've been noticing that comparisons are a danger sign. Should you visit “the Paris of Siberia”? Or listen to “the Belgian Elvis”? I'd rather go to the original Paris and listen to the real Elvis (but not at the same time, I think).

The comparisons are out of control. It's like grade inflation – you have to gush just to keep pace. There are Canadian Bill Brysons, a lesbian Bill Bryson, a Bill Bryson of service management, the Bill Bryson of dentistry, a transvestite Bill Bryson. (Okay, I made up that last one.)

Mark Twain (Mark Twain!) is described by Mental Floss Magazine as “the Bill Bryson of his day.”

Curious as to who these paragons of comedy were compared to when they were young unknowns, I poked around and found some reviews of their first books. According to The Library Journal, writing about Bryson's first book, Lost Continent, “As the book grinds on, it descends into a litany of 'then I went here, and next I went there.' Browsers reading the opening bits will snatch it off the shelves, but many will return it unfinished.” Publishers Weekly was also unimpressed. "Some of Bryson's comments are hilarious--if you enjoy the nonstop whining wisecracks of a 36-year-old kid." But there were few comparisons to other writers. Bryson, it seems, was an original, if whiny, voice.

Bryson, Twain, Parker, Sedaris

David Sedaris' first book, Barrel Fever, didn't do much better. “Ironic, detached, cool, with an eye for the perverse and weird, Sedaris seems to have all the tools of your basic postmodern humorist. There's only one problem: the guy ain't funny.” said the Library Journal. Booklist compared him favorably to Dorothy Parker, though.

Kirkus, in their review of At Wit's End, called newcomer Erma Bombeck. “the Joan Rivers of Ohio suburbia.” That was a compliment in 1967.

Of course, if you must write a glowing review of a book you didn't like at all, you can resort to outrageous exaggeration, as New York Magazine did about Bryson's Lost Continent: "The kind of book John Steinbeck might have written if he'd traveled with David Letterman instead of Charley."

Here are a few books by authors who require no bogus comparisons to Hemingway or Shakespeare or even Joan Rivers. They are just funny.

Celia Rivenbark's You Can't Drink All Day if You Don't Start in the Morning

Laurie Notaro's An Idiot Girl's Christmas

A. J. Jacobs' The Guinea Pig Diaries

Listening Isn't Reading -- Why Braille Is Still Necessary

Tue, 2 Feb 2010 23:02:02 -0500

If you listen to an audio book, have you read the book?

It's undoubtedly a different experience to read a book with just ink and paper (or pixels and screen) between you and the author than it is to listen to someone's vocalization of the sentences. In Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, author Maryanne Wolf describes how the brain processes written information differently than audio or other information. Stanislas Dehaene delves even further into the science of reading in his book, Reading and the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention.

Listening or reading? It seems like an academic question. What difference does it really make? But a couple of articles I read recently have made me wonder.

In this New York Times article, we find that many blind people, including the governor of New York, don't read braille. Instead they rely on audio books, recordings of newspapers and magazines, and human assistants to orally brief them on the business of the day. Text-to-speech technology allows people to hear their emails and other documents.

And in this article, we find that the major provider of books in braille in Canada is about to go out of business if it can't get government funding or some other source of revenue. They are having a hard time convincing people that braille is even necessary anymore.

In the New York Times article, one advocate for the disabled characterizes blind people who don't read braille as illiterate. He describes their writing as “phonetic and butchered.” If it were merely a matter of acquiring information, as seems to be the case with the woman profiled in the New York Times article, then there's no doubt that the quickest, most efficient method of “reading” is preferable.

Swiss Postage Stamp, braille-embossed

I can't help thinking that it's a mistake to let braille die, though. According to the National Federation of the Blind, only 10% of blind children learn braille today, down from 50% in the 1950s, and only 10% of blind people in America read braille. Is it just as good to listen to a book as it is to read it? When I listen to a book, my mind wanders more often than it does when I read a book. If I want to read faster or slower, it's up to me, not the person who is reading (although there are audio books now with adjustable speeds). My brain seems more passive when I'm listening than when I'm reading, but that could be a lack of mental discipline on my part.

Human beings have been talking and listening to each other for at least 50,000 years. We've been reading and writing for around 7,000 or 8,000 years. People don't have to be taught to listen. Reading is a different, more complex activity than listening.

Don't get me wrong – audio books are great for car trips or when you're in the gym. Multitasking dynamos like Governor Paterson and others, blind or not, find audio books and other recorded documents an efficient way to acquire information. You have to admire that.

But listening isn't reading. I hope that braille instruction and braille books remain an available option for people who can't read print.

braille e-book reader: technology that doesn't exist -- yet

Roundup: Contests, Spring Previews, a Secret Online Bookshop

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 23:01:29 -0500

Contest #1

Amazon.com has started accepting entries for its third year of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. Grand Prize is a publishing contract with Penguin. Many of the finalists in all the categories also received publishing deals, so it isn't winner-take-all, by any means. Here are the rules and instructions. A big change this year is the addition of a separate Young Adult category. Enter soon, the deadline is February 7, or whenever they have received 10,000 entries.

Contest # 2

Powell's.com is accepting nominations for its annual Puddly Awards, their readers' favorite books. The twist this year is that the Awards will be for the Books of the Decade rather than the Year. Nominate your favorite book of the decade for a chance to win the grand prize of $250 worth of Powell's credit, or for one of the four $50 gift cards. The deadline is January 31, only a few more days.

Spring Previews

Find out what books are coming soon with the Spring Publishing Previews. We like to know what's coming in the next few months so we can get first dibs at the public libraries, or request review copies.

The Publishers Weekly issue is available online, and this is quite a bargain because it costs $12 for the issue, if you can find it. We normally find a copy at the Barnes & Noble or Borders. We find it's worth the splurge, because we discover as many books from the ads as we do from the PW lists. But last year's Fall Preview was noticeably thinner than the previous Spring Preview. Both the number of books being published and the number of ads were way down, bad news for publishers and readers alike.

The other link is to 2010 Paperback Preview of The Bookseller, the U.K. Equivalent of Publishers Weekly. Click anywhere on the page to enlarge. Many of the books listed here won't be published in the U.S.

The Online Bookshop You Don't Know About

But there is a website where you can buy U.K. (as well as U.S., Canada, and Australia) books for discount prices with FREE SHIPPING. We've been ordering books from The Book Depository for the past six months or so and have no idea how they make money at all. They often have the best prices on books of any online bookstore, and they really do provide free shipping to much of the world, including North America. It usually takes a week or 10 days to get a book from them.