Neat trick by Bjango’s Marc Edwards.
Note: I interviewed Marc for The Industry a while back. It’s a good read even now — Marc is a super talented and interesting guy.
We move from an awful example of horrible accessibility to a stunning example of innovation and work for the greater good of humanity.
Google’s self-driving car transports Steve Mahan around his hometown — and he even orders a burrito from a drive-through. Did I mention Steve has lost 95% of his vision? It doesn’t seem to make much difference as he cruises through town in the driver’s seat.
When Amazon first created the text-to-speech feature in their Kindle devices to read purchased books out loud, book publishers and the Authors Guild promptly claimed its use was illegal and forced Amazon to make the feature optional for every individual book. Needless to say, many publishers never allow it, even today.
The quote that Paul Aitken, executive director of the Authors Guild, gave to explain the Guild’s decision is as follows:
“They don't have the right to read a book out loud. That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.”
It appears the concern raised is that reading a purchased book out loud would kill sales of audiobooks. This view seems very short sighted and greedy.
If a Kindle owner wants to listen to high quality and professionally recorded audio from a book, there are plenty of options available: the first which springs to mind is Audible, Amazon’s own audiobook service. Unfortunately, the library of audiobooks is much smaller than the library of ebooks. Many more books are available for Kindle than are available through Audible.
If a customer searches Audible for a title they’d like to listen to, then discovers it’s unavailable, it seems reasonable to assume the customer will simply do without. Text-to-speech integration in technology is not mainstream enough for most people to consider as an alternative to audiobooks.
It goes without saying that a computer reading text out loud — à la Siri — won’t sound anywhere near as good as a professionally voiced audiobook.
There is a group of users, however — larger than you may imagine — who will expect text-to-speech integration in a device like a Kindle and don’t mind its relative shortcomings: the visually impaired or disabled. Where the Authors Guild step over the line, in my opinion, is in their refusal to accept text-to-speech even in the capacity of accessibility.
The Disabled World website writes about the Kindles, back in 2009:
Many people with disabilities were happy to learn that the Kindle version 2.0 includes a text-to-speech feature, but their joy has been short-lived because the Authors Guild promptly pressured Amazon to remove the audio feature from Kindle due to concerns that it would interfere with sales of AudioBooks. Amazon’s response was to allow each publisher to decide whether the text-to-speech feature would be available for their titles.
Several publisher [sic], to include Random House, have already told Amazon to turn text-to-speech off, cutting off a resource related to people with disabilities and a channel of mainstream media access. Disability Rights Advocates (DRA) and additional members of the Reading Rights Coalition are working to get Amazon to reverse this policy. It seems that Random House prefers greed over people.
[Emphasis mine.]
It’s worth noting that blame shouldn’t be placed on Amazon for this. I hope the Authors Guild reconsider their approach to text-to-speech and allow its use for accessibility reasons.
Text-to-speech is a bread and butter accessibility feature. If a customer cannot enjoy a book visually, why penalise the customer further by not allowing them to enjoy it audibly? Audiobooks are clearly the preferred options for both average customers and the visually impaired or disabled, however the library of audiobooks is smaller. The compromise text-to-speech makes in quality is below what average customers want, but it’s a lifeline to the visually impaired, who have few options.
Amazon and the Authors Guild should be striving to improve the experience of every reader, by making more titles available as audiobooks and improving accessibility of Kindle devices.
Note: it’s worth mentioning that when VoiceOver is enabled on iOS, purchased books in iBooks will be read out loud. Books purchased through Amazon, shown in iOS’s Kindle app, will not.
Sorry to start off Monday with such negative news, but some details from this article in the NYT are interesting:
For weeks, there have been signs that the public was not buying new PCs over the holidays in the numbers many had hoped. Now add to them new figures from IDC, one of the best-known scorekeepers for the market, showing that worldwide PC shipments declined 6.4 percent in the fourth quarter from a year earlier.
That decline was worse than the 4.4 percent drop that IDC had previously forecast for the fourth quarter. It was also a sign that the biggest thing to happen to the PC business in years — Microsoft’s release of the Windows 8 operating system and the millions of dollars that went into promoting it — did not rescue an industry that suffered a nasty sales slump for most of last year.
Then:
Microsoft and Intel will suffer further, with the Wintel PC market share expected to decline to 65 percent in 2013, from 72 percent in 2012.
Firstly, it’s worth noting that I find this hardly surprising.
Additionally, I think this great image shows exactly what Nick Wingfield, the writer of the NYT piece, was trying to explain. There’s certainly a trend in Wintel computers, and it isn’t a positive one.
Speaking of it being easier than ever to support indie creators, here’s a great tool if you happen to be US-based and want an easy way to accept payments, either one-off or recurring.
No love yet for UK folks, though.
Fred Wilson has some smart things to say about subscription revenue models for businesses:
The emergence of the subscription model has made the software business better. In the old upfront license fee model, software companies would trade at 2-4x revenues. Now they trade at 6-8x revenues. That reflects the recurring, almost annuity nature of the subscription model.
Whilst he speculates that “software is not the only technology orientated business that utilises a subscription revenue model”, I think he glosses over a few businesses closer to my heart: namely independent writing, podcasting — and even music and movie making.
It is now easier than ever to start a subscription-based, creative project and have it support itself sustainably, as the subscriber count grows.
Smart point by MG Siegler. I’ve been wary of Android as a business for a while. It certainly seems the only company making money from Android is Samsung.
Not Google, not HTC, not anyone else.
And Samsung, the biggest Android handset maker, is flirting with leaving the platform. This could be the story of 2013.
Nvidia announced their Project Shield portable gaming device at CES on Monday, with no details on price. Or availability. Or battery life.
The Shield seems far too bulky and oddly shaped to carry around comfortably. It’s thicker and bulkier than existing portable gaming hardware and even thicker again compared to the average smartphone. Calling it portable is certainly optimistic — can you imagine this being used on public transport? It looks to be clunky and awkward in size, almost certainly too large for an average pocket. It also appears more delicate than a smartphone, with a hinged screen worth protecting. It may well be “portable”, but I can’t see this being used outside of the home to the same degree people use a Nintendo DS.
Fortunately, the Shield isn’t only trying to be a portable console. It has another trick up its sleeve.
Where the announcement gets really interesting is Nvidia’s integration with traditional PCs with Nvidia graphics cards. I’ve already pondered Valve’s interesting position in gaming and how it might create for an interesting future for consoles. Whilst the Shield isn’t a “Steam Box”, it’s possible to use the device as a controller for games on a PC and use the Shield’s screen instead of the PC to view the action. Essentially, the Shield becomes the screen and the controller for some of your PC games — in much the same way the new Wii U’s game pad acts as a screen and controller to the Wii U. Interesting.
Nvidia is presenting a device with two goals: to be a portable gaming system (running Android) and a way to play PC games in a more portable way… when at home. The Shield fails in the first goal — smartphones and existing gaming devices like the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS do far better jobs at either being mobile and ubiquitous (smartphones) or being a “good enough” compromise of mobile and quality gaming (portable consoles). The Shield isn’t mobile when compared to a smartphone and it isn’t better than existing home consoles or PCs for gaming around the house. I don’t even need to mention how short the battery life must be when streaming HD video over Wi-Fi.
If you want a portable gaming device, either use your smartphone or buy an existing console — which will come complete with a rich ecosystem of top-tier gaming titles. If you want a controller experience at home with pleasant HD graphics, either use a cheap Xbox controller with a gaming PC or simply get a full console. They’re cheaper than ever. The Shield is trying to solve problems which have already been solved.
As it stands today — before the Shield even exists — dedicated electronics hardware is in decline. Gaming hardware is dying. I don’t have much hope for existing portable gaming consoles like the DS or PSP, so announcing a brand new device with very few gaming titles in an arguably worse form factor than existing products seems to be a sure failure.
The First Steam Box?
Another related announcement to come out of CES is the “Piston”, the first Steam Box device for use with Valve’s Big Picture mode. As I said over a month ago, whilst speculating about the future for Valve and Steam’s Big Picture mode:
If Valve released moderately powerful hardware, bundled with a “Steam OS” and took away the hassles associated with PC gaming, they could be on to a winner.
I still stand by this. Valve are in a unique position: they create hugely successful games, own an extremely popular gaming distribution platform and have a huge audience: as I write this, nearly four million users are online on Steam. I believe we’ll know much more about Valve’s Big Picture mode when first party hardware is released. Until then, I remain hopeful. As I said back in December:
I wonder if existing console manufacturers even consider Valve a threat to their business today. Perhaps they should.
Yes, that says Billion.
There’s been a total of over 40 Billion iOS apps downloaded in total, with almost half of those coming from 2012. These shockingly huge numbers start to paint a picture of how big iOS really has become — and how huge growth is still happening.
Turns out that our coins over here in the UK are rather beautifully designed. News to me.
Thanks, Vignesh.
When I read this, a few things struck me. Firstly, that’s a lot of iPhones.
Second, Horace doesn’t usually preface estimates with quite this many caveats:
So I’m very uncomfortable with my forecast and find it hard to defend this quarter. I considered not publishing one at all because it gives too much confidence when none is warranted.
We may be surprised when the real numbers come out. Horace’ll be biting his nails.