[gui-talk] Fwd: Article: Preparing to Sell E-Books, Google Takes on Amazon

[Trevor Saunders]

> Publishers can lay out books in PDF format to be accessible to the blind.
> It is costly to do this, it is a matter of reformatting the entire book.  Of
> course the DAISY books also have to be reformatted.  The transitions between
> print and these formats is considerable and it is not as easy as it sounds
> because in many cases the content has to be remade. 

yes the end format must change, but if the content's source is kept in some 
reasonable markup language this is really no more than running the content 
through aprogram to produce the desired layout.

 This is because Adobe InDesign is a disaster area for the blind, in my opinion and it inherently
> destroys text so it cannot be made accessible.  That is because its concern
> is for the visual layout and not for accessibility.

exactly!  the purpose of PDF is to describe how something looks this is fine for the blind just don't ask it to be something else.

> But accessibility is viable and can be made into any PDF file. 

as above it is possible but this is sort of a bad idea PDF is a format for 
laying out how something looks if you want the content with out the graphical 
format use a different format.  Use PDF for what it is meant for and html or 
something when you just want to describe the structure.  Don't try and make PDF do
something it wasn't meant to when there are better ways.

>  So I do not understand all this hype over Kindle when the technology exists 
> to just download a book onto your computer and read it, with the digital 
> rights associated with the book.  All you need is Adobe Reader, which is a 
> free download from Adobe.com.  And you can do this in 36 languages.  So why 
> all the fuss and why is this not getting done!

first ther is the principal that we should have equal access.
then there are several practical reasons:
1) amazon is selling books that can only be read on the kindle
so what one can do with a computer is sort of irelivant.
2) kindles are cheaper and more portable than even laptops so they are better if 
you just want to read a book.
3) as above though PDFs may be in some sense accessible this just isn't a sensible idea there are formats that are far better for our purposes, because they only describe structure rather than layout.
4) PDFs are much larger than content without the layout sometimes as much as 20
times larger!  Also adobe reader is a painfully slow application.
5) the pdf viewer apparently is not terribly accessible on linux according to 
the Orca site, and there is no reader at all that works in a console.  I may be
wrong, but DRM'd PDFs can't be run through a pdf to text program so if you use 
linux and don't have gnome you are completely out of luck so far as DRM'd PDFs 
go.


> 
> James G. Pepper
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