Siri & iBooks E-Books = Audio Books: Public libraries (and their staffs!) are of course big proponents of the practice of life-long learning. After all public libraries are places you can go, either in the real world or online, to learn more about a subject whether that subject is how to write a better resume, how to cook a dish with exotic spices, how to fix a car or leaky faucet or to discover what were the causes of World War I.
And since I’m a public librarian working in a public library I am always pleased both to assist patrons in learning something new and to learn something new myself. With that in mind, I was thrilled last evening after owning three different iPad models since 2010 to discover something I didn’t know about the iPad! And what I discovered it that if you own a Siri equipped iPad (3rd of 4th generation models) and buy e-books through the iBooks app (that is Apple’s e-book store app); you can go into settings and turn on the Speak Selection option which will in turn allow you to highlight any text in the e-books in your iBooks library and have the Siri personal assistant voice read the highlighted text to you! So in essence you can turn all printed e-books purchased from Apple’s iBook store into audio books. And I thought that was cool! You can even slow down the Siri voice to suit your taste.
To do this, that is to turn this function on which incidentally you can do not just with the iPad but with Siri equipped iPhones and iPods too, you:
- Open the Settings app
- Select the General option
- Scroll down to the bottom of the General settings option and tap the word Accessibility to open the Accessibility options
- Under the Vision section that displays turn on the Speak Selection option
- Then open the iBooks app, open a book, select the text you wish to have read aloud and you’ll now see an option that says “Speak” (it is the option on the far right hand side of the highlighted text menu”; tap Speak and presto – the Siri voice will read the highlighted text!
Now granted Siri will only read a page at a time – so you might want to make the text really tiny before you select it and instruct Siri to read it – but still it is a cool that we have this option with our newer Apple devices.
And not surprisingly I found out about the Siri reading option by reading an article! The article, which also features an accompanying step-by-step instructional video, is titled Siri Trick Turns iBooks into Audio Books, here’s the link:
http://www.tuaw.com/2013/03/18/siri-trick-turns-ibooks-into-audiobooks/
Digital Buyers Rights Are Not Just About E-Books: Digital buyers rights might also be described as consumer’s “Digital Property Rights;” and I did know, as does anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis, that at the present time consumers don’t have the ability to actually buy and own e-books or digital music, audios or videos. We can purchase a license to access the content but we don’t own it and thus we can’t give it away, lend it to a friend or bequeath it to our heirs. And I did know that – however, I was astonished to read an article yesterday that illustrates how colossal an issue the lack of ownership of digital content is because in fact the term “digital ownership” doesn’t just apply to e-books, e-videos and e-audios it also applies to the propriety computer and software systems built into new high-tech cars and other vehicles.
And with that in mind, did you know that you can buy certain new high tech cars and other vehicles that require computer software and hardware to run properly but that even if you “buy” one of those cars or other vehicles you don’t own the proprietary software and/or hardware that runs that vehicle? So if your high tech car or other vehicle breaks down and needs to be fixed you don’t have the authority to fix it! Instead you have to pay the manufacturer more money for one of their technicians to come and fix it!
I came across an article in Wired on this subject yesterday titled Forget the Cellphone Fight – We Should Be Allowed to Unlock Everything We Own, and the author Kyle Weins gives two excellent examples of how manufacturers are in essence using outdated copyright laws to infringing on the property rights of consumers – essentially blocking us from actually owning things we buy and making more money in the process– in the case of his examples – the items are cars and farm vehicles.
In the first example, Weins discusses a small farmer in California named Kerry Adams who purchased two high tech transplanter machines at round $100,000 each for his farm. These high-tech computerized machines broke down shortly after he purchased them and he didn’t have the right to fix them because the software that runs them is proprietary– so the manufacturer required that he pay one of their approved technicians to fly out to his farm to fix the machines. And naturally the machines have subsequently broken down again and are now sitting idle on his farm because he cannot afford to keep paying the manufacturer’s technicians to keep traveling out to his farm to fix the equipment that he isn’t allowed to fix himself and he isn’t allowed to take the machines to a local business to be serviced.
And consider the second example, new high tech cars that break down. Now if my 2004 Ford broke down I’d take it to Kapral’s Auto & Tire over on Pulteney Street and have them fix it – which they could do because it isn’t a high tech car with a built in computer system.
However, with todays’ new high-tech cars – ones that have proprietary software built into them and for which the diagnostic tools are copyrighted by the manufacturers – consumers are finding that independent auto repair shops either cannot fix those cars because the manufacturers won’t allow the independent auto repair shops to buy the copyrighted car manuals or the shops cannot fix them without charging their customers more money because they have to pay for the car manuals for these complex high tech cars which are too complex for auto mechanics to fix without accessing the manufacturer copyrighted car manuals.
Unbelievable!
You buy a new high tech car or a pricey farm machine and you don’t really own it!
We better all hope that our cars and other high end vehicles we purchase don’t break down because otherwise we’ll have to pay the manufacturer more money to send one of their approved technicians out to fix our vehicles or we’ll have to pay more at our local auto repair shops – that is always assuming that the manufacturer will graciously allow our local independent auto repair shops to purchase the manuals for the model cars we “own” so they can fix them. I highly suspect the manufactures would rather force consumers who purchase new high tech cars into by-passing using their local repair shops. I am quite certain they’d rather we all drive our vehicles, or have them towed, to manufacturer approved regional service centers where approved technicians and mechanics will no doubt charge us even more money to fix our vehicles than we would have paid at our local repair shops – that is if we had been allowed to take our high tech cars that needed repair to those shops; but apparently that is yet another consumer property right that modern manufacturers would rather consumers not have – the choice of where to take your car to have it repaired.
And I certainly hope that our government catches up with the rapidly-advancing-technology-copyright versus Consumer Property Rights issue soon. And further that Consumer Property Rights legislation or Supreme Court rulings, as the case may be, should cover all physical and digital materials and all hybrid materials like cellphones and high end, high tech cars – and all the consumer rights we’ve always had previously in our democratic society – to actually own all the items we buy – and own them in their entirety – so if our high end car breaks down we should be able to access the tools we need to fix it ourselves or have our favorite local auto mechanic fix it for us without paying the car manufacturer more money or being told where to take the car for approved repairs. And of course, we should also be able to own our e-books too and read them on any device we wish, loan or give them to anyone we wish or even donated them to our public libraries for their next cyber book sale if we wish.
And in the meantime, while the manufacturers of high tech vehicles and appliances and producers of digital content (e-books etc.) are blocking the traditional consumer right to buy and own items and the government is sloooowly working to catch up copyright law wise – I’ll be keeping my 2004 Ford for as long as I can!
And here’s the link to the Wired article:
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/03/you-dont-own-your-cellphones-or-your-cars
Have a great day!
Linda R.
References
Sande, Steven. (2013, March 18). Siri trick turns iBooks into audiobooks. TUAW. Online.
Wiens, Kyle. (2013, March 18). Forget the Cellphone Fight – We Should Be Allowed to Unlock Everything We Own. Wired. Online.
Tech & Book Talk at SSCL 