Further Thoughts on Kindle 2's Text to Speech

See Kindle 2: Possible Drawback for Authors and Readers.

Having my Kindle 2 has been a great thing for me. It has opened up a huge selection of reading material that hitherto was outside my reach at least without a great deal of work and expenditure. Almost as important is that it allows me to be a consumer rather than a recipient of a government program, something that feels more dignified to me. Yes, the libraries for the blind are equivalent to any library, an institution I value and admire. But there is the feel of being done for and cosseted that we certainly will not get past for some time, I think, in our culture.

Ebooks and in particular Kindle 2 allows someone like me, an intellectual and overachiever, some independence and self sufficiency that I just could not have before.

So though obviously from my blog entry I understand authors who might not care to put their books on it because of the limitations of the test to speech, it also makes me sad that those books will be out of my reach for the most part. I tolerate the silliness of text to speech dictionaries because I'd rather do the mental adjustment than miss out altogether.

What I would love to see, given that the ancillary beneficiaries of the text to speech of the Kindle 2 are regarded as rather whiny demanding people and therefore not taken all that seriously as consumers, and to a degree understandably so, is authors and publishers coming forward to make their desires known about higher quality presentation of their work. I am not talking about your championing print impaired people. That;'s for us to do. I hope you will advocate rather for your work, for its optimal presentation. You deserve it. Your reward will be a wider readership.

So rather than dismissing this one outlet, think about speaking up not only as a consumer but as a producer of goods.

Let me just add that I recently, as many of you know, really battled to get independently published books taken seriously by my local library for the blind. They were out of hand rejecting indie books because of a bias that was not without some foundation. The result of my careful education is that this library, anyway, will look at an indie book and judge it uniquely when they choose whether to reproduce it in an accessible format. On its individual merits.

I hope I have brought indie authors and at least one of these libraries together. It seems like one of my quests in life is to get authors to make sure their books are available to the avid and hungry readers who are print impaired and those readers so they have access to "books outside the box".

Kindle is a stepping stone.

Kindle 2: A Possible Drawback for Authors and Their Readers

Getting your novel published on Kindle has lots of attractions. Let's face it, the more ways people can read it the better. The fact that the Kindle also has the "read aloud" feature makes the device not only accessible to people with print impairments, it basically turns a book into an audio book without paying narrators and sound studios.

Unfortunately one unfortunate fact has come to light. We already know that the average audio book reader, meaning the person, not the device, will not likely tolerate the mechanical nature of the text-to-speech voices. Print impaired people are used to it by now. While the books recorded by the National Library Services are professionally narrated, our various speech output applications have about as much resemblance to a human voice as any run-of-the-mill robot.Any authors worrying about the competing with their audio books can relax. It ain't gonna happen.

Now a new problem has come to.. well, not light, but definitely sound. While happily listening to Helen Hollick's splendid Sea Witch on my own Kindle I was dismayed by the pronunciation of the main characters' names: Jessamiah and Tiola. My computer reads them as jess-uh-MY-uh and TEE oh la. That's pretty close to what Hollick intended. But the Kindle 2 reads them as juh SAY me ack and SHY luh! Say what?

I contacted Amazon's Digital Rights people and asked whether the pronunciation of words in the Kindle's dictionary can be edited. The answer was no.

Now if I was as attached to one of my characters as I know Hollick is to Jessamiah (I am, but "Lawrence" and "Shannon" are easy to prounce) I would absolutely refuse to let his name get so mangled and would simply not put the book on the Kindle. This won't be an issue if you, as a novelist, don't care whether the people who prefer or have no choice other than to listen to books read yours. (If the latter is the case, then expect a withering look and n o review from me!) But my educated guess is that the Sea Witch series will never be on Kindle.

Whether the Kindle's makers have any clue about this limitation, I can't say. I personally believe that the "read aloud" feature on it was purely a gimmick to sell a new generation of Kindle. If that's what it is, then hey, I am happy to take advantage as I was with the first talking watches. But I'm with Hollick if, as a result, she never puts her books on their catalog.

Historical Fiction is Speculative Fiction

Remember when they used to call genre of Heinlein and Asimov science fiction?Some clever person came up with the idea sometime in the 60s or 70s to start calling it speculative fiction. This new designation was more accurate, after all, and what's more, it allowed for inclusion of some other genres with similar if not identical fans. What we called science fiction was not just about science. It was the "what if?" genre. What if humans could travel at speeds over the speed of light? What if we could travel through time? What if there was a society made up of magically powered princes who rode winged dragons/ That sort of thing.

You may, if you read me regularly, recall when I shared the comments of a woman who accused historical fiction of being misleading and downright wrong. She insisted that people read historical novels and come away with inaccurate ideas of what historical people were like, what they thought, and what they felt. My own reaction was something like,

A. Most historical novelists really try hard to research their eras and the events and people they portray, and
B. So what if they don't? It's a novel, not a textbook, for crying out loud.

That second of course sparked a furious flurry of "well I would never!" and "how could you?" and "lighten up, will you?" on the discussion lists and blogs. Oody woody hadda iddy biddy chip on our shoulders about not being historians, I think. In my conversations with actual historical novelists, I run into the "An it not be totally absurd, do as ye will". No potatoes for Pontius Pilate. That sort of thing. The story is what it it's all about.

So, to get to my point at long last, it occurs to me that historical fiction is also speculative fiction. I thought about this when reading the author's note in one of Sharon Kay Peman's novels. She said she tried to get it right, but if she wasn't spot on perhaps it did not really matter so much. She put it a l ot better than that, but just trust me. I agreed with her. She expressed something along the line that we can only guess what the people who lived through the events we write about thought or said or felt about them. We might have a hint in letters they wrote, but that's pretty rare. So what we do as historical novelists is speculate. We know, for instance, that Harold Godwinson hightailed it to Stamford Bridge where he fought, among others, his own brother Tostig. Then he had to turn around and dash south to be conquered by Normans. We know this. But how do we know how he felt when his kid brother lay dead near the bridge? And did he think about Edith Swanneck as he rode to his death? Was there a point when he thought, "Oh my God, we are going to lose this one?" Did one of his friends see the arrow pierce his eye and think, "No! Not Harold!"

That's all speculation, and it's our job to fill in those unknowns, the words that should appear in the word ballons. We try to do it carefully, ethically. We love these people we write about, and we want you all to come to know and love them too. So we will do all we can to make them real, make them accurate, but also make them feel like someone you could know.

Over and over I hear how someone became interested in history itself by reading historical fiction. In an essay I posted some weeks ago written by a teacher, she recounted how a young girl having read a fairly romantic portrayal of Pocahontas asked herself what the woman would probably have really been like. What would she have made of England when she went there? Did she ever miss her native shore? What really happened between her and John Smith? This same little girl started hitting the history books. If she keeps at it, makes primary research her career or even j ust her avocation, who knows what she might discover?

To the woman who told me historical novels were lies, all I can say is that it is one of the wonderful aspects of humans that we have imaginations and that we speculate about "what if"? It's that instiinct that also makes us wonder, "How would that person feel if.." and breeds what we calll humanity.