Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin
That is not what he is saying. There is a difference. The difference is as simple as this: Most ebooks cannot be read by your PC using text-to-speech because the DRM (or something else) TURNS OFF that capability. You have to purchase a specific product with audio rights.
|
The "most" thing is quite a big error; most ebooks do not have drm; many *commercial* ones do, that's true though even there I am not sure about "most" unless you add "current books from large publishers" as a qualifier, but as with e-music I give almost 100% odds that people have very few (unconverted) drm e-books overall on their devices, pc's...
I think that the crux of his argument is in "convenience" On the Kindle 2 you just touch a button and you get automatic TTS on a dedicated device.
On a Pc/Mac, it's true that you can get a good TTS engine, feed whatever format it wants and listen with a touch of the mouse say, but that's not what people generally want, they like to listen on a dedicated device, maybe an iPod or another mp3 player and here is where you lose convenience.
Again you can save your TTS file to a mp3 but it takes time, work...Usually not worth the trouble considering the quality unless you have no choice
because of your vision
As people pointed out you can make the same arguments about automatic language translation and I expect that if ebook devices sell better, you will get a translation engine at some point too;