Signs, Signs, Everywhere Are Signs... except here.

This week, let’s roll back the clock to an earlier form of technology. Let’s go way, way back. Because it seems to me that by and large, libraries missed the boat on one of our oldest pieces of tech: signs.

When I walk into my local public library, there’s a noticeable lack of direction given to me. There’s a sign pointing out the circulation desk, another for the reference desk, and well… that’s about it. If I want to just browse the shelves, I better know my Dewey system. And honestly, how many of us library students even know Dewey? I have a fair grasp on the major numbers, the hundreds… maybe. No doubt when I start working in a library that knowledge will be fleshed out more. But how many patrons can we expect to know Dewey? No where near the majority. And yet I glance around my library shelves and see nothing but small plagues with numbers on the ends. Is there a reason there are no signs with subjects spelled out in plain English? Why not advertise our books? Place a nice big sign over the mystery novels. Point out the medical information books. Looking for history books? Follow the big arrow over here.

I know I’m not the first to say this, but it seems like there’s a lot we could learn from our biggest competitors: the bookstores. If I walk into Barnes & Noble, I can find the types of books I’m looking for with a quick glance around the store. In a typical library, I have to wander among the shelves to even find a sign for a Dewey range most people don’t even know. It’s no wonder my friends would rather kill time browsing in a bookstore than the local library.

And I’m sure the coffee and muffins don’t hurt either.

A Follow-up on eAudiobooks

Having received a record two comments, I thought I would continue my thoughts on merging eBook and Text-to-Speech technology. (Rest assured this has nothing to do with my inability to think of a new topic at the moment.)

After a little more searching, I’ve found what I consider to be the best Text-to-Speech voice engine: Neospeech. It only barely edges out Apple’s Alex from my previous post, but I believe the Neospeech voices sound a bit less robotic. Better yet, these voices aren’t exclusive to Mac users. Go ahead and paste part of this blog entry into the free online demo. (IE only.) Also of note, and perhaps amusement, are the foreign language voices. I know a bit of Japanese and those voices sound just as good as the English ones. What’s fun though, is having it read English text in another language. While a few words are unintelligible, the majority of them sound as if they’re spoken by someone with a heavy accent. To me, this speaks volumes on how sophisticated and flexible the technology is becoming.

Bonnie mentioned how boring it would be to listen to a single droning voice read a work of fiction. I do agree it rather unpleasant with the current technology. I've been using it a bit when reading articles online and multitasking, and it's serviceable for that. It's especially nice for more snooze-worthy readings. I find I can absorb more of the article than I would if I attempted to just plow through the reading.

As for fiction, it would be possible to have different voices for a Text-to-Speech audiobook, but the text file would need to be tagged to indicate when different characters are talking. While this would be a simple solution, it would also greatly hinder the flexibly of generating an audiobook automatically from any text file. Of course, it might be possible for the software to detect different characters automatically one day, but this seems unlikely to me. One mistake would be quite distracting, or even confusing, to the listener. Not to mention having to assign the appropriate gender to each character. How much can we really trust a program to figure out if “Alex” is a man or woman?

Another problem is the large storage requirement for a high-quality voice. It looks like the best voices currently take up about 200MB each. This definitely hurts the idea of producing full audiobooks from relatively small text files. Still, even with large voice files, the text itself would only take up a fraction of the disc space a full audio dictation would. An audio book of Alice in Wonderland weights in at 86MB, while an ebook is only 160KB. After the initial space investment with the voice file, it rapidly becomes much more efficient to use ebooks to generate the audio. And let’s not forget the huge saving in server costs this would be to libraries!

For now, it seems the practical applications are a bit limited, but my interest is certainly piqued. Now if you’ll excuse me, I believe a friend of mine is about to receive a hilarious call from a confused Chinese man. ;-)

-Joe

eAudiobooks

I am a huge fan of audiobooks. I first tried them with the Harry Potter books about a year ago when I was taking the Greyhound to visit a friend in Virginia. (You may remember the more horrible part of that story from our first class.) Facing the prospect of an overnight bus trip will leave one searching for ways to fill the time and this seemed like a solid choice. By the end of the trip, I was completely solid on audiobooks. There are just a lot of little conveniences you get with them. Never having to find a comfortable position to hold the book open is just the beginning. I could enjoy the scenery as the bus sped across the country. Or why not kick back and relax with my eyes shut? I could even keep an eye on the crazy looking guy across the aisle from me. All while still enjoying my book and not missing a beat.

When I arrived back home, I found audiobooks to be even more useful. Cooking dinner? Well that’s the perfect time to play an audiobook. Working on my webste? Sure! Bring on the audiobook. Driving? Audiobook! Playing a video game? Audiobook! Doing laundry? Audiobook! It never ends.

The downside is, audiobooks are pretty expensive, and my local library’s collection is a bit lacking to boot. But that’s when an idea came to me. I used to play around with Text-to-Speech programs a few years back. They were okay, very robotic sounding but understandable enough. So I decided to check out what progress had been made since I last looked. I am very impressed with the level of quality in these new Text-to-Speech engines. They seem to be crossing a threshold from robotic sounding voices to human voices with some odd quirks. At this rate, I imagine extremely realistic voices will be widely available in 5 years. There’s already some buzz on the Internet about the possibilities here. But I think application in particular could have a huge impact on libraries. eBooks have long been scorned for the eye strain they cause. But why not marry eBooks with high quality Text-to-Speech software? The end result would be audiobooks with a much smaller filesize and no cost paying a professional to read the text aloud. In the future, we could just drop a nice small text file into our MP3 players and press play. Most Text-to-Speech programs already have an option to create an mp3 file from text. This could be just the boost the eBook format needed. And it could mark a whole world of change for librarians.

In the meantime, I’ll have to make due with my favorite free audiobook site, LibriVox.

From Complex To Simple

Continuing the same train of thought from last week, I’d like to look at my current pet project I’ve been pushing myself through.

I mentioned before that I first learned to use our old DOS computer so I could play games on it. Well, technology has come a long way but I still just love to play games. It can be frustrating at times being part of the first generation to grow up with a new form of media and having to deal with the stereotypes and scapegoating that are associated with it. But that’s a post for another time (and perhaps another blog).

A few years ago, exhibiting the librarian tendencies I hadn’t yet identified, I decided to catalog and display my video game collection online. It was just a simple HTML page I had to update by hand, but several people started complimenting me on it. Some even wanted a similar page for their own collection. Eventually the interest became so great that I decided to turn it into a full-fledged website. Fast-forward a year of tinkering in my spare time, and it was finally done… or at least done enough to launch. It seems there’s always a new bug that needs to be fixed, a new feature to be added, or a new usability issue to handle. This has probably been the most I’ve ever struggled with technology. It also has been one of the most satisfying projects I’ve done. I’ll say I’m much more sympathetic to web designers now!

And finally, a confession! I made (what I like to think is) a very professional website, coded in PHP with MySQL databases, user registration, page customization, a comments system and other bells and whistles. Yet two weeks ago when we started using the class wiki, I was completely lost! The organization of the system baffled me for a good half hour. Of course, once I grew accustomed to the layout, it became simple to use. Still, it was a swift reminder just how specialized our knowledge can be. Sometimes it takes a little bit for all the tumblers to fall in place so everything clicks. If you’re new to something, even the simple things can seem tricky at first.