Archive for the Category: Social media

Voice Dream e-reading app: Stellar for text to speech—and promising as a general reader

The latest: An update of this post focuses on education-related issues of read-aloud apps. Also, I’ve just tried a promising Voice Dream beta with paging; more to come. Finally, NPR on May 20 ran a segment on developer Winston Chen. – D.R. A Catch-22 dogs those of us who most often read e-books visually but [...]

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Tell Dec. 6 DPLA hackfest what a good blog editor/creation tool should be like—to help libraries and patrons easily create their own stuff

If only WordPress, Drupal and the like were as easy to use as Windows Live Writer (screenshot) or at least the less cluttered versions of Microsoft Word! Inserting images and sizing and positioning them just right, for example, can be so much simpler with LW and Word. That’s why, here and here, I urged the [...]

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On e-books, better speech recognition, tablets, and libraries

Could stellar recognition of speech be The Next Big Thing for tablets and smartphones fit for e-books—well at least eventually? Imagine the possibilities. And I don’t just mean e-book apps set up for “Next page” or “Go to end of chapter” or “Find such-and-such word.” Nor do I simply have in mind the composition of [...]

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Should libraries start their own, more trustworthy Facebook?

Public discontent with Facebook‘s arrogant privacy policies, and its ever-intrusive commercialism in general, keeps growing. Could it be time for libraries—perhaps allied with academic institutions, newspapers and other local media—to start their own more trustworthy Facebook? A project for the Digital Public Library of America? The existing Facebook would not go away; but at least [...]

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