First impressions can be very wrong…..I came across this story yesterday, and my first reaction was “What now? How silly can one get? Ereaders for the blind? No way”. I then thought something along the lines of this is yet another example of people rushing to law for totally stupid reasons.

My First reaction was wrong:

Anyhow, I went on the read the article and looked at a video they had made to explain their problem more clearly, and that changed my mind completely and I realized how my immediate reaction was way off beam, and that they actually had a good point.

I had simply never thought of ereaders and blind people as having anything to do with each other, and if I had thought about it, I would have assumed that by their very nature, ereaders, as with normal paper books were simply no use to blind people.  How on earth could a blind person use an ereader?

Text to Speech is the key:

But as they point out, many ereaders support what is called Text to Speech, which means that the ereader can “read” the ebook out loud for you. But the particular ereader they are upset about, the Nook does not have this function and their argument is that the library should have purchased an ereader that did support Text to speech, rather than the Nook,  so that blind members of the library could take out ereaders in exactly the same way as sighted people did. For example the Kindle, which is an ereader with this function.

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M-Edge, well known for their wide range of ereader accessories have now launched their uView Mounting System on a number of their iPad covers. This system allows you to click your iPad into the cover in a whole range of different manners, and apparently is the first step in a set of covers using this system to allow you to mount a number of iPad gadgets in these covers.

Rather than write a long screed describing what this system offers us, I thought I would simply show you the promo video they have made, which describes pretty well what it is, and how you use it.

This mounting system, which I wrote about a while ago in another post about M-Edge accessories (link below) is now apparently sold with the range of iPad covers in the photo here, and at no extra cost as far as I can discover.

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So, we now have the Mark III iPad – Jolly good

On his blog (Link below)  Shawn Blanc who has a blog  dedicated to all things Mac,   very much to my surprise admits to preferring his Kindle to his iPad for reading ebooks with.

It seems that about three months ago he bought a Kindle Touch ereader in order to be able to make an honest comparison with reading on his beloved iPad, and being a fair minded individual, he took it seriously, and stuck to reading on his Kindle.

To his considerable surprise, he discovered that the Kindle was a real pleasure to use for a number of reasons, specifically he gives the following reasons for his fondness of his Kindle (his words, not mine):-

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As you will probably know, the animated short “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore” won an Oscar as the best animated short film, but what you may not know is that there has been an iPad app for it since late last year.

This allegorical tale about the place of books in our world and culture which you can see below, is a superb small film, likable and understandable characters and a story line which very quickly becomes apparent.

It is described as follows:

Following a hurricane which destroys his town Morris Lessmore is whisked away to a colourful old house full of books which come alive and interact with him spreading happiness in the community. He remains their custodian for years until it is time for him to pass on and another guardian of the books take over from him.

There is a sort of self animated book that seems to be his guide in the world he finds himself in… It animates itself by flicking through its pages, a rather nice idea, which works visually very well.

So, here is the film itself, which to my surprise is freely available on Youtube.

Fun, isnt it?

Now for the App itself.

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Oceanhouse Media have recently produced an App for the iPad and iPhone specifically intended for interactively reading “And to think I saw it on Mulberry Street“, which was the first book that Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seus) published for kids way back in 1937.

In this book, Dr. Seus’s main character is a small boy called Marco, and he fantasizes as he goes along with his father on his way home from school about all the things he sees as they go.  Elephants, Rajahs, and all manner of other wonderful things, rather to his father’s irritation, who in spite of having instructed Marco to keep his eyes open and to tell him what he sees, doesn’t approve of the wild runaway imagination his son lets rip on their walk home.

But we do, of course!

As this is an interactive version of the book, there are a number of useful and fun possibilities built into it:-

Read to Me

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