Did you know your bookshelves could have bookshelves?

[kestrell]

Through search superskills and the use of my accessible tape measure, I found mini-bookcases which fit under the eaves of the aerye, and I thought I had gone about as far as I could go with that, but it turns out that there are book stands and book racks which are small enough to perch on top of the bookcases.

I got this spiffy adjustable wooden one
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00UD6DA30/ref=ppx_od_dt_b_asin_title_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
just this morning. It cost $10, and it came out of the packing already to go, just unfold the ends and adjust the length. It's also highly tactile, with vines carved all over it (I love vines).

Not unrelated to my ongoing book storage problem, it's
science fiction and fantasy week on GoodReads
https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/1890?ref=sffweek2020_eb

While GoodReads could really use an accessibility makeover (seriously guys, not even using headings?), I do enjoy it for a number of reasons and first among those reasons is all the lists, such as this one I found recently:
2020 books by Native authors and authors of color
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/132826.2020_Books_by_Native_Authors_Authors_of_Colour

Another great feature is that, if you check a book that isn't out yet as "Want to read," you get an alert the day it comes out. As I used to keep a list for this very reason, that's one less list I need to keep track of.

Occasionally, I even post reviews, and I always get a little buzz when someone likes one of my reviews. Oh, and when you look up a book, you can see the available formats. Now that NLS is using a lot of commercial audiobooks, especially for sf and fantasy, you can find reviews mentioning the narrator. The audiobooks for Rebecca Roanhor's duology, _Trail of Lightning_ and _Storm of Locusts_, for instance, was amazing, and pronounced all the Dine (pronounced di-NAY, the Navajo language, and the name by which the Navajo refer to themselves) words smoothly, which is the main reason I chose the audiobook.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Oh those lovely sliding bookshelves--I had one in my ill-spent youth.

I faced facts and got qualified for Bookshare -- holding up a book is just too painful, and my book stands are far enough away that I need 36pt type to read stuff. Unfortunately, NLS eligibility seems to require one's print impairment to be down to a single cause. For me it's the combo of vision & physical.

Right now, I'm grateful I can afford to buy a tangible copy before I read something from Bookshare. If only ebooks didn't have pesky DRM and full-justification. (At point sizes that large, justified text becomes unreadable -- the spaces between the words are much bigger than the letters.)

Do you buy tangibles?

[kestrell]

I definitely still buy print books, that's what the bookcases and book racks are holding. Lots of books still aren't available in electronic format, whether we're talking Bookshare or Kindle. I'm currently proofreading a scan I made of a print book about Oxbridge dons, and and another book by Joan Aiken on writing for children. I just bought a book of Victorian erotica that neither Alexx nor I had ever seen before. I have a huge tome on women medievalists that I've scanned but not proofread yet. I'll try to get a picture of my bookcases onto DW sometime soon (I don't even need an excuse to use Seeing AI to take picturs and have the app describe what's in them).

How are you reading Bookshare books, in which app and in which fomat? I download the Daisy without images version and then extract the XML file. Then I rename it with a HTML extension. By then there is no DRM left on it. You could open it in a word processor, convert it to plaintext, and then email it to your Kindle, if you have one, and tweak the appearance however you wanted.

Pass the wine

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks for the XML to HTML tweak -- it works! I can read a book in any browser! The only drawback is that navigation and footnotes seem to break, or maybe that's just Safari letting me down?

As it happens, I've been very frustrated with my reading software this week. I'm way too fussy about how stuff looks -- I was a typesetter in an earlier life! I don't want to read things in ugly fonts, I want to see italics and bold because I've been using these cues for 63 years damn it.

I think I have every possible iOS reading app that supports highlighting and saving notes. All of them glitch at random.

Right now my favorite is EasyReader from Dolphin. It lets me set the pace of a visual reading cursor that highlights sentence-by-sentence, while also turning off the voice. This combo creates autoscroll for my very large print. The only drawback is EasyReader doesn't understand iOS's Files app, so I have to Share > Open in EasyReader.

Voice Dream Reader is Files-literate, and it permits much faster autoscroll, but it insists on full justification. I pinged the developer -- we'll see.

I've also used Bluefire Reader, Kobo, MapleRead, KyBook 3, Marvin, Hyphen, PocketBook, BookFusion, and Speech Central. Apple's Books is hopeless -- doesn't support a single column in landscape, which is what I use because huge fonts. *None* of them offer "next page" or "previous page" with Voice Control -- only Libby, the newer library app from Overdrive does that (but no notes).

Do I want too much? Why yes, I do.

Turns out the Kindle app does support copying notes -- maybe I should be converting my ePubs to mobi?

Re: Pass the wine

[kestrell]

For the most part, unless I am proofreading a scan of a print book and think maybe other people will be reading it, I don't give a fig about appearance or formatting, as long as the ebook reads reasonably well. I used to take DRM-free commercial ebooks, open them in Word, convert them to plaintext, and then do a search and replace for any punctuation that the cheap TTS on my accessible ebook reader might mangle. For example, I changed all the em hyphens to double dashes, because TTS will just read some junk string when it comes to most of the fancy symbols.

Alexx has this massive macro which runs a bunch of commands so that any ebooks and/or scanned texts he reads fulfill his high standards.

I think I was just forged in the crucible of having to scan all my textbooks while I was at UMass Boston, and I just didn't have time to make them perfect. Between that and the way accessible ebook readers mangle the text, I just learned to hear a more perfect version in my head.

Speaking of old ebook readers: my first accessible ebook reader, the Book Port, produced by APH?, was so wonderful. All it did was read ebooks, but the OS was so stable, and it ran off AA batteries, sixty hours on two batteries. I was one of the first people to have one, and write documentation and FAQs for it, and I have mourned it every day since it died years ago, though I still keep the corpse in state in a box somewhere.

Anyway, Alexx has been searching for one for years--they show up on eBay sometimes--and yesterday he found one, and bought it for me! It was being sold by a charity so the money even goes to a charity for deaf people. It should take about a week to get here.

This has been the ebook of my quest for the perfect ebook reader, so never feel that your ebook expectations are too high.

Oh, but have you thought of formatting your ebooks in Word? Would that be able to tweak itthe way you want? Could you write a macro to do the formatting?

Re: Pass the wine

[jesse_the_k]

I did just find an intriguing ePub3-compatible reader -- with MathML support! -- which is open-source, cross-platform (Windows/macos/Linux) and specific about maintaining non-visual access.

https://www.edrlab.org/software/thorium-reader/

Thorium descends from a Chrome extension, Readium, which Chrome no longer supports.

Running it on my laptop in macOS Catalina. Very basic -- does support copy, but not highlight, yet. Very actively in development. Will keep my eyes peeled, so to speak.

Re: Pass the wine

[jesse_the_k]

I think I was just forged in the crucible of having to scan all my textbooks while I was at UMass Boston, and I just didn't have time to make them perfect. Between that and the way accessible ebook readers mangle the text, I just learned to hear a more perfect version in my head.

I'm thrilled you're getting another BookPort!

ALSO huge props to your experienced and inventive mind! Part of this is my squirrels! brain right now. Anything that can distract me will.

Theoretical additional book storage without bookcases

[cvirtue]

There's this nano-stuff that supposedly functions like gecko feet and you can use it to stick anything to anything without damage or residue. I haven't tried it. But for someone who needs book storage space, maybe it would work for sticking books to the walls by their largest flat side. You'd need to put a rubber band around it, so it wouldn't flop open. If it works, you could wallpaper your room in actual books.

Re: Theoretical additional book storage without bookcases

[kestrell]

This past week, Alexx helped me hang a pair of hanging shelves above one of my bookcases, along with hanging a large wall tapestry that shows...more bookcases, of course, on another wall. So now I don't even have very much free wallspace in the aerye. There is the eave under which I have my futon, but I would worry that at some point while I was sleeping, the gecko feet would just let go, and books would fall on my head.

But I might try to find the gecko feet stuff anyway, because you can never have too many kinds of adhesive.

Re: Theoretical additional book storage without bookcases

[cvirtue]

I haven't tried it yet, but it does seem very interesting.