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walkitouthttp://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/opinion/25blount.html
The Guild has come out against this feature for fairly obvious reasons (hey! We're not getting a cut of the new way for people to enjoy our product.). As I predicted, this isn't going over great (blind people say, you jackasses -- what, you don't want us to read anything that isn't available in braille or on audio?) even tho the Guild is trying to say, no we just don't want the sighted people getting the bennies you blind folk do. And then there's the whole reading-to-the-kiddies aspect of the puzzle.
I _think_ this is really all about drive-time: people have long commutes. Books on whatever make those enjoyable. A kindle reading mechanically is hella less money than buying each book individually. And maybe a lot of those drivers don't give a flying leap about having Jim Dale read to them (not that the Potter books are available on the kindle, anyway).
I don't care too much how this turns out, really. It's just fun watching Roy Blount Jr. have to be conspicuously unpopular, a position I suspect is he not used to. He's not very good at it, either.
The Guild has come out against this feature for fairly obvious reasons (hey! We're not getting a cut of the new way for people to enjoy our product.). As I predicted, this isn't going over great (blind people say, you jackasses -- what, you don't want us to read anything that isn't available in braille or on audio?) even tho the Guild is trying to say, no we just don't want the sighted people getting the bennies you blind folk do. And then there's the whole reading-to-the-kiddies aspect of the puzzle.
I _think_ this is really all about drive-time: people have long commutes. Books on whatever make those enjoyable. A kindle reading mechanically is hella less money than buying each book individually. And maybe a lot of those drivers don't give a flying leap about having Jim Dale read to them (not that the Potter books are available on the kindle, anyway).
I don't care too much how this turns out, really. It's just fun watching Roy Blount Jr. have to be conspicuously unpopular, a position I suspect is he not used to. He's not very good at it, either.
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Date: 2009-02-25 09:51 pm (UTC)my kindle arrived today!
Date: 2009-02-26 03:04 am (UTC)And my new kindle has a single cord. It's a small usb to normal usb connector and off the normal usb connector in-line is a short cord that plugs into an ordinary US outlet. If I lose it, I have replacements for both pieces (albeit not as elegant) already lying around the house.
Yippee!
While the radio on/off switch is now software-only, it's really easy to get to, so I'm not too unhappy about that. I'll post in a bit what I think of the text-to-speech usw.
ETA: Okay, not so happy right now. It's not normal-small; it's normal to micro. I don't have a normal to micro. And while I was able to connect to my laptop once (remember -- the radio doesn't work where I live) and move over a copy of a kindle book, I haven't been able to get the fucker to go into drive mode since. My laptop doesn't recognize it or something. I am now seriously annoyed.