Accessible Reading discussion

I recently bought The Death of Nnanji from the Kindle store here in the UK and was pleasantly surprised to find that it had no DRM whatsoever.

I was able to open the .azw file in the kindle for PC app and use their dreadful text-to-speech voice, or to use Balabolka, open, and save out plain text or audio using a SAPI voice on my system.

I assume that other titles published by EReads on Kindle will similarly have a lack of DRM. GO wild, folks.

Why give Amazon my money, in that case? EReads publishes titles in places that are much friendlier towards accessibility, like fictionwise. Even Kobo uses Adobe DRM, and Adobe accessibility, while not wonderful, is at least better than the tiny crumbs Amazon has bothered to throw us. I refuse even to purchase physical products from Amazon, until they make a serious effort to make Kindle accessible on all platforms, so I doubt I will be spending any money to purchase EReads books through them. The only place Amazon gets money from me is through audible.com, but as soon as audiobooks.com comes out with an iPhone app, I will be cancelling my Audible subscription in order to get completely away from the evil that is Amazon.

Samuel wrote: "EReads publishes titles in places that are much friendlier towards accessibility, like fictionwise.

I couldn't find this particular title elsewhere. Doubtless it'll propagate.

I concur wholeheartedly with your thoughts in general, and the mobi format in particular is horrific (I much prefer EPub).

EReads may have been a bad example but, as unpalatable as it may be there are a large number of small, independent publishers (or even just authors) who use their platform as a single outlet, or cases where specific titles are considerably cheaper. In that sort of case I prefer to give at least a little money to the author rather than dig torrents to avoid Amazon.

I don't torrent, and I don't purchase Kindle books. If it's a self published author, and I can find contact info, I email the author encouraging them to make the ebook available on platforms other than Kindle. Anything to do away with Amazon! But either way, if it's Kindle only, I don't read the book, unless I can get it via CNIB/Bookshare/some other legal source. Giving these authors money just encourages them to stick with Amazon, and that's not something I want to do, no matter what.