[bookcourier] RFB&D (long)
- From: "Debee Norling" <debee@xxxxxxxx>
- To: <bookcourier@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 29 Jan 2006 17:53:11 -0800
I've followed the discussions several months ago about RFB&D but had nothing
to add then.
I work for a community college and we borrow about seventy books per year
for some vision impaired, but mostly learning disabled students.
I am blind and have a personal RFB&D account as well. They are my main
source for technical books, so I really depend on them. I borrow around 32
books per year.
I know that Springer is actively working with RFB&D so I simply want to
publicly encourage you to continue. If this means I have to pay for a BC
update that supports AudioPlus, believe me, I'm more than happy to pay. The
BC is so well-built and reliable. I hate throwing my money at any endeavor
with a poor track record, but am generous when I love a product.
Also it appears that the intent was to market BC mainly for the LD
population, while the BookPort covered the vision-impaired market, so I wish
to gently remind Springer that from my subjective experience, I serve ten LD
students for every one who has a visual impairment. This is a huge market,
but unlike blind people, LD people aren't typically big on reading for
pleasure, as a generalization of course. But in America, they use RFB&D.
RFB&D is kind of driving me nuts, because they inundate me both at home and
at work with inaccessible print brochures about Audio Plus (Daisy with their
own DRM) and now they say they will completely phase out cassettes in 2007
which is next year.
Daisy is a great thing, but I'm unimpressed with any of the players so far.
I love my BC and would much rather use it than one of their players. It
looks to me like they took a $20 CD player, with all its moving parts, added
hastily written firmware, added copy protection, jacked the price up to $250
and gave it the fancy name of Audio Plus! And they are a non-proffit which
makes it even more shameful!
The user interface on many of the players seems very sluggish and buggy and
poorly thought out. Half the community colleges in California have hurried
out to buy the fragile players only to have them break the first time a
student dropped one. I hate to admit how often my BC has been dropped; once
it even skittered the full length of the floor of a bus from the back to the
front and all that happened was that its batteries fell out! No moving parts
and regular firmware updates make me wish I could recommend it to more
people, but I'm the only print-impaired person I know who really reads a
lot.
And I recently bought EZ-Reader, which is the cheapest software for Audio
Plus playback RFB&D sells, and it has the most unfriendly product activation
I've seen in a while. And after getting through their overly cumbersome
"registration" process, the product won't work on my system; gives me a
runtime error because it can't register some obscure OCX control. And due to
the stupid copy-protection, I don't dare uninstall it to try again. I wish I
could personally chew out the idiot that released something so buggy.
Until RFB&D knows how to insist on quality control, I'd much rather be
recommending a BC to my ninety-two students!
--Debee
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