Can humans be better audiobook narrators than bots? Of course. Like the amazing Dion Graham, who narrated my Drone Child novel, the best vocal whizzes don’t just read. They act. If only I could afford to use Dion on all my titles! But for nonfiction and the right novels, auto-narration is now good enough as a cost-reducer. The most polished AI voices are more pleasant than many Homo sapiens even if they’re not at the Dion level. Global audiobook sales may reach tens of billions by the end of the decade, and the bots could be one way to dip your toes into the water without raiding your IRA. Th ..read more

Could this be one reason why the Kindle Scribe has gone on sale? For $400, Lenovo later this year is to sell a Scribe rival able to record lectures with two built-in mikes and turn handwritten notes into searchable text. Handily, you can sync the audio recordings with notes. Perhaps a tool for journalists, too, not just students? Engadget reports that the Smart Paper can also let you “delete and reorganize notes, and place them into folders. You’ll be able to access millions of ebooks and search saved books and articles that are on your Smart Paper. If you leave the notepad at home, you’ll sti ..read more

Eager to try out the Kindle Scribe’s handwritten-note capability, I gambled $419 on the 64GB version with the deluxe pen. Loser! I was up against such nuisances as a 50MB cap on PDF files transferred online, and I didn’t want to mess with workarounds. Not to mention the Scribe screen being too slick for me to write on, despite most reviewers’ opinions to the contrary. Given Amazon’s closed ecosystem, I wasn’t getting enough in return. Back went the Kindle for a full refund. Ah, but there’s a nice little twist. The 10.2″ Scribe today went on sale for $295 in the 16GB version—hardly a bargain, b ..read more

I loved Draft2Digital‘s ability to create ePub books from Word files, not just distribute them to places ranging from Amazon and B&N to Apple and the Overdrive library service. D2D can grind out printer-ready PDF files, too. Also Mobi ones. D2D remains the main way for book files from me to go to multiple stores, even if I upload to Amazon and some others directly for business reasons. But D2D, last time I checked, had a flaw. Notably, it would not let me omit a long subtitle from page headers so it wouldn’t show up as two ugly lines. And Support didn’t know when, if ever, the dev team w ..read more

Skimming news reports, some optimists may think they’ll soon be able to send their existing Kobo, Apple, or Nook books to Kindles since those other brands use ePub. But DRM in many cases will still get in the way–even with Amazon’s Send to Kindle feature being able as of late 2022 to convert ePub to a Kindle format. So here’s a question. Could the anti-DRM movement take advantage of this customer confusion? Let’s remind ebookers that DRM, not format, may now be the sole obstacle to enjoyment of their previous purchases on many different devices. The longer ebooks are around, the more people h ..read more

One of the most fearsome anti-trusters was Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican president who jousted with the oil companies. We know who today’s oil companies are. Big Tech in so many cases. And Google has just reminded us with its appalling ban on Android reading apps that don’t use Google’s payment system. Goodbye to full-function Kindle apps for Android cell phones. The Google tax would be too onerous. Remember, Amazon and the like must shell out money to publishers, which come with their own price requirements. As an ebook reader, writer or publisher, what targets would be on your anti-trust l ..read more

I have long been a gungho fan of Voice Dream Reader, a text to speech reader that can nicely display text as you’re listening. I’ve enjoyed the ease of use, above-average accuracy of voices, and flexibility of the text display, which offers a number of fonts and other settings. Now, after starting out in iOS and expanding to Android, Winston Chen, the perfectionist developer has finally released Voice Dream Reader for macOS, and it is a beauty. A full list of features and supported formats, including ePub and PDF, is here. I gave the Mac version a quick test drive on a 2014 Mac Mini without im ..read more

I just came across an excellent write-up called How to Fork a Book: The Radical Transformation of Publishing. “Forking” is a term borrowed from open source software, whose license allows anyone to make their own modified versions that diverge from the original, taking it in another direction, like a fork in a path. Well, nowadays there are open source books. Forking turns them from fixed, unchanging artifacts into living works that grow and develop over their lifespans or even give birth, their very authorships blurring. That, in turn, reminded me of conversations I had in the past year or so ..read more

Much of the loudest buzz within the book business is of Random House’s plan to swallow Simon & Schuster. S&S among other advantages could enjoy more outlets for its book. But such a vision still reeks of “shuffling chairs on the Titanic.” Merger or no merger, and regardless of Random House’s profits, the industry as a whole is a dismal underperformer, as shown by pre-Covid numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics—covering publishers of all kinds, large and small. Americans in 2019 were spending 33 times more on big-screen TVs, Netflix, and other nontext diversions than on books ..read more

Virus or not, will you still buy books despite little distractions like Donald Trump inspiring his worshippers to storm the Capitol and his foes to draft impeachment papers? If so, you’re not alone. Much of the news is cheery in “COVID-19 and Book Publishing: Impacts and Insights for 2021,” a free 50-page report from three seasoned industry consultants, Cliff Guren of Syntopical, Thad McIlroy of The Future of Publishing, and Steven Sieck of SKS Advisors. True, the coronavirus has bankrupted some brick-and-mortar stories, and libraries will have to compete at budget time with other agencies the ..read more