{"id":553,"date":"2004-09-09T23:01:59","date_gmt":"2004-09-10T03:01:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theoreti.ca\/?p=553"},"modified":"2004-09-09T23:01:59","modified_gmt":"2004-09-10T03:01:59","slug":"wheres-the-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=553","title":{"rendered":"Where’s the news?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Books on computers: format combines text and audio narration<\/a> is an example of a story that appeared in a number of Canadian venues about a Florida company, AV Books, Inc., that is coming out with a first title on CD where you have can read a book on the screen and hear it in MP3. I can’t believe that this story was successfully placed by the company – companies have has talking books for at least a decade. The first ones I saw were for kids from Discus Books in the late 80s (correction below), then Voyager has a series of books for computers. The only thing new in this story is MP3 format for the audio and there are plenty of people exchanging MP3s for audio-books.
\n
\nHistorical Note<\/b>Discus Books seems to have dissappeared. I found a reference to one of their products at this educational page, 1c.html<\/a>. Here is the reference,<\/p>\n

Keyword: children’s literature
\nTitle: The Tale of Benjamin Bunny
\nSeries: Discus Books
\nFormat: CD-ROM
\nLocated: Ridgely’s Computer
\n…
\nLiterature Description: A delightful tale of Benjamin Bunny and his cousin Peter Rabbit as they go visit Mr. McGregor’s garden and to retrieve Peter’s clothes and the trouble they almost get into.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Update – I found more information about Discis. It was called “Discis Knowledge Research”, is now in receivership and released its first CD in 1990. See Biography<\/a> of Joseph Scheuhammer. He writes,<\/p>\n

I joined a then new company named Discis Knowledge Research, Inc. They have since gone into receivership, but if you do a web search, I’m sure you will find a link or two.
\nOur first product line was information rich versions of children’s books on CD-ROM, whose purpose was to help children learn to read. For example, clicking on a word in the text elicitted its pronunciation, an oral context specific definition of the word, and a second language explanation. Clicking on pictorial elements invoked a label of the pictured item, a pronunciation of the item, and a second language explanation. Clicking on a speaker icon at the beginning of a sentence cause that sentence to be read while it was hilighted phrase-by-phrase. We first released product in the summer of 1990. Examples of titles include Beatrix Potter’s “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” and Robert Munsch’s “The Paper Bag Princess”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Books on computers: format combines text and audio narration is an example of a story that appeared in a number of Canadian venues about a Florida company, AV Books, Inc., that is coming out with a first title on CD where you have can read a book on the screen and hear it in MP3. … Continue reading Where’s the news?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-markup-and-text-representation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}