reading

With the launch of the Amazon Kindle 2 and its text-to-speech feature, a broader range of reading materials would now be available to the 15 million Americans represented by The Reading Rights Coalition, a group which defends the rights of those who cannot read printed words because of blindness, dyslexia, spinal cord injury, or other disabilities. However, The Authors Guild is looking add a hoop or two for people with print disabilities to jump through .

As previously written by my colleague Greg Sandoval, "the retailer, which makes the popular Kindle electronic-book reader, announced late Friday that the company is modifying systems to allow authors and publishers to decide whether to enable Kindle's text-to-speech function on a per-title basis."

According to The Reading Rights Coalition: "The Guild has told them that in order to read their books with text-to-speech they must either submit to a burdensome special registration system and prove their disabilities--or pay extra. The Guild's position is contrary to the principle of equal opportunity for all and discriminates against millions of people with print disabilities. The Guild's position is outrageous and discriminates against the millions of people with print disabilities who are eager to be their readers and customers."… Read more

If you've ever used Read It Later, you'll probably like a new service called "I Need to Read This." It does the same thing, letting you bookmark stories that you want to read, but not right away.

What's nice about I Need to Read This is that you can use all of its services through bookmarklets instead of having to install anything in your browser. There's simply "I Need to Read This" and "Read an Article" bookmarklets, which you drag up to your browser's toolbar, and on any story … Read more

We in the industry often use a little trick to eke out extra page views or to let you see more stories on a single page. Called the page break, it truncates longer articles and requires that you click another link to load up the full version of the story. We use it here quite often because our format is to put a bunch of stories (which can be quite long) on one topic-driven page--Webware, Green Tech, Crave, and so on. This can make the site take longer to load and give your scroll wheel finger quite a workout.

There'… Read more

Streamy, the personalized home page meets social feed reader, is now open to everyone. We originally profiled the company back in mid-2007. Since then it's been rebuilt and is noticeably faster. It's also streamlined the blog reading experience, which is the core of the service.

While I originally compared Streamy to Digg for the way it filtered up news stories based on who was reading and recommending them, these days it's a lot closer to FriendFeed. There's more of an emphasis on reading the content without leaving the site, and interacting with other users who have … Read more

If you often use the print story button just to get a Web article on one page, and without the hijinks that get you to mistakenly click on advertisements, Readability may be just what you're looking for. This small bookmarklet, which you simply drag up to your bookmarks toolbar to add to your browser, will re-format the page you're on to make it easier to read. It gets rid of layout, advertising, and any of the site's original navigation. In return, the story retains its links, photos, and any embedded content, letting you read freely and without … Read more

Nokia has released the first major update to the Qt "cross-platform application framework" since it acquired Trolltech a year ago. Qt 4.5 is now available under the open-source LGPL (Lesser General Public License) and GPL licenses, along with two commercial licenses for older versions.

ReadWriteWeb highlights what a "cross-platform application framework" means:

Before we get into the details, let's examine the term cross-platform application framework. What does that really mean? It means that software developers can write an app that will run anywhere Qt (pronounced cute) is supported.

In practice, then, the app will … Read more

The reading public today was inundated with news about Amazon.com's new Kindle 2 ebook reader, but the iPhone may already have a headstart thanks to Google Book Search and Safari Books Online. Both services are accessible via MobileSafari and require live online access, unlike the Kindle 2.

Last week Google, announced a mobile version of Google Book Search that gives you access to 1.5 million public domain books in the United states (and about .5 million in other countries) from your iPhone and other web-enabled mobile devices.

The books are now optimized for mobile … Read more

I've made no secret of my love of e-books. I read 'em on airplanes, in bed at night, in line at the post office, and so on. But I do have a complaint: They're not priced substantially lower than their dead-tree counterparts.

That's why I'm tickled about this: e-bookseller eReader is offering nine Random House works of fiction absolutely free.

These aren't bargain-bin titles from no-name authors, either. The collection includes three crime-noir novels from Charles Huston, all of which earned 4.5 stars from Amazon readers; The Whiskey Rebels, a brand-new (and well-reviewed) historical … Read more

Parents looking to entertain their children should check out Speakaboos. The site offers up popular story books, nursery rhymes, and lullabies, all read by celebrities like Kevin Bacon, Kelly Ripa, and rapper/actor Nick Cannon. There are also Flash games, e-cards, and coloring pages that can be printed out from PDFs.

Parents can provision special accounts for their children, which lets them limit the type of content that can be accessed. This also locks them out of the option to buy full-quality versions of the stories, which can be listened to offline--either on the computer or portable devices like the … Read more