----- Original Message -----
From: "Lori Bell" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>; <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, January 04, 2004 12:14 PM
Subject: blindbooks Looking for e-book testers


You are invited to participate in an exciting betatest
of digital talking books!  The Mid-Illinois Talking
Book Center and TAP Information
Services will be working with a company called
OverDrive to provide and test text-to-speech function
and quality in Adobe Acrobat electronic
books in PDF format.  The feedback we receive from you
will assist OverDrive and Adobe in evaluating the
"read aloud" function in Adobe
formatted electronic books and testing how the feature
works in selected titles.   This will assist the
Mid-Illinois Talking Book Center and TAP
Information Services in evaluating various formats for
digital talking books, reader preferences, and
providing feedback on these to
publishers, other vendors, libraries, and talking book
centers.  You can look at the site at
http://ebooks.mitbc.org.

To participate in this pilot project, you must have a
computer at work
or at home with an Internet connection.  You must have
a sound card and
speakers or headphones so that you will be able to
hear the
text-to-speech function of the electronic book.  The
Adobe Reader 6.0
software is free and we will provide a variety of
digital books for you
to test.  We will give you an evaluation form to
assess the
functionality of the "read aloud" feature of the Adobe
electronic book;
find out about any difficulties you had using the
reader or the read
aloud feature and to ask how the experience might be
improved.  You will
also be asked to rate the quality of the
text-to-speech experience for
each e-book sent to you to read.  For those titles
where the read aloud
function is acceptable, we will ask you to listen to
the entire title.
One of the key objectives of this test is to identify
those titles where
the read aloud function works well throughout the
entire title so they
can be cataloged and made available to others.  We
anticipate that you
will download at least one e-book per month from the
project website.
If you desire, it may be possible to send e-books
involved in this beta
test more frequently.  Unless the quality of the
text-to-speech is
horrible, we ask that you listen to the entire book.

We hope this is only the beginning of an exciting
partnership between
talking book centers and libraries and OverDrive.
OverDrive has become
the leading provider of eBook technologies and Digital
Rights Management
solutions for publishers, retailers, and libraries.
OverDrive is a key
technology supplier and distributor to Random House,
Microsoft
Corporation, AOL Time Warner, HarperCollins,
McGraw-Hill and hundreds of
US and international trade, education and academic
publishers and
retailers for their digital content.

Mid-Illinois Talking Book Center is a subregional
library serving people
with visual, physical, and learning disabilities in
central Illinois.
The Center is part of a statewide network administered
by the Illinois
State Library and a national network coordinated by
the National Library
Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped.
MITBC recently
undertook a pilot project to offer Audible.com digital
audiobooks to
patrons on handheld Otis players.

TAP Information Services provides a wide variety of
services supporting
libraries, consortia, government agencies, museums,
publishers, and
other organizations in the information industry.
Services include:
support for projects, strategic planning, workshops,
writing and
editing, conference services, consortial negotiations
and agreements,
and speeches.

If you are interested in participating, please contact
Lori Bell at
MITBC  [log in to unmask]
or [log in to unmask] or Tom Peters at TAP
Information Services at (816)228-6406
[log in to unmask] Thank you for your
consideration.

Sincerely,


Lori Bell, Mid-Illinois Talking Book Center
Tom Peters, TAP Information Services





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