I’m curious how people read sutta ebooks. I’d especially like to know what app people use on a tablet to read EPUB/Kindle files. Also what kinds of non-Kindle e-ink devices people are using.
As long as people are voting I don’t really care where the discussion leads as long as it is related to ebooks.
Are you happy with the quality? I noticed that Wisdom had done several of their books on Audible. And do you find that Audible is workable for people with limited/no vision?
Audible is amazing for people with vision impairment. However, since Buddhism is not widely popular in the West, the selection is limited. Therefore I make do with Ajahn Chah books and this or that, but my major source of study is voice.suttacentral.net. I spend about two hours a day listening to suttas found on Voice and am looking forward to the Vinaya on Voice.
Amazon’s Kindle could be amazing, but I find it so frustrating to use.
I don’t even have vision problems (other than reading glasses) and I find the non-book text parts of the Kindle interface to be unnecessarily tiny. One thing that most people don’t know is that the text to speech that was available in the early devices (think Kindle Keyboard) is still there inside all the Kindles. You just have to plug a usb audio dongle into the usb port and activate something and then boom, even the cheapest Kindle has text to speech. I can find a link if folks are curious.
The sad part of Kindle is that the potential for good has been masked by the need for making money. In this way, perfectly good technology such as the initial TTS has been slowly pulled back behind a paywall even for books I have already bought. This made me sad and my Kindle is now just sitting in a drawer, with all the suttas and more, unused. That very experience, the knowledge that others would seek to profit from the ending of suffering convinced me to seek other solutions such as Voice.
I have no problem with Audible because voice-actors are paid for their service. I think that Amazon realized that Kindle TTS would be competition for Audible. It became a conflict of interest.
You may be quite right. Having bought eBooks that I could not listen to on my Kindle (because I did not have the Audible version), I have grown somewhat irrationally adverse to Kindle.
In further, weak defense of my intransigience, I would also offer that the voicing of Pali terms creates difficulties for TTS.
Thank you for the link to the e-pubs.
Interestingly, Bhante Sujato’s segmented approach has proven quite the powerfully immerse experience as one reads and hears and recites Pali/English text segment by segment. I am not sure how the segmented approach will play out in e-pubs overall, but I am now quite the fan of segmented suttas.
