I have an idea of the Bookshare downloader app that I wanted to make and I wanted to receive opinions regarding it before I start to work.
Currently you can use Bookshare in fully accessible way only with apps that implement its support, and that is limited to just a few apps. Technically you could download the files from the Bookshare web site and use it with any app, but from my experience in talking to people here that is something that is likely to be avoided.
This new app would allow you to log in to the Bookshare service, search for the book, download it and then open in any app that supports the file format. As Bookshare supports export to epub files, those should be importable to almost any reader app. There is some note on the Bookshare instructions for developers that some books may not be supported for this - if it turns out to appear in more than just few cases and the app proves to be interesting I will add local conversion from the DAISY format to epub in the future which would make all books supported.
Just for an example for this use case, currently Speechify doesn't support Bookshare integration but it supports epub files. With this app you would be able to load Bookshare books into Speechify.
The app would be completely free, the only indirect benefit I would have is that the app would mention that you can use it with my app Speech Central to read the content, but Speech Central is also completely free for VoiceOver users. On the other hand launching of this app would mean that Speech Central would drop direct support for Bookshare in the future in favor of this app. It is beneficial for technical and procedural reasons - e.g. Bookshare constantly changes free credentials for developers and Apple may block the app update if credentials for testing are not right and that could cause multiple problems, some of them potentially huge. Also due to fairly low usage of those options it is unlikely that more services will be added to Speech Central, but independent app may have more traction on its own and it may turn out to be reasonable to do that. At the moment I already have support for Project Gutenberg so it is very likely to be added to this new app.
Comments
my thoughts
Here are my thoughts.
First, if you make this app, I'd love to be a beta tester for it.
Second, I like the idea! Maybe you could also consider supporting other services like Overdrive with this app also.
Now, here are my thoughts on what I'd like to see from this app. It's mostly with searsting, browsing and I guess in a way organizing the books.
Before I go any further, I highly suggest that if you start work on this app, that you put the latest version of the Bookshare API. in it. That would give a lot of the features that I'd like to see. How you'd go about doing that, I don't know. The only reason I know that's the latest version of the API. is that Voice Dream updated to it sometime last month, I believe. Also, I do have some feature requests that not only I would like to see, but, I think that other users would like to see them too.
To start with, I'll list the features I'd like to see that are in Bookshare 3.
1. I'd love to be able to search for a book by keyword, author, title, etc etc. Sometimes I only know the author, or title of a book. Sometimes, I have to find it through keyword search.
2. I'd like to be able to browse books by category, most popular, newest, special collections, etc. I'll get into special collections a bit more later.
3. I think this feature would be helpful for students and teachers. I'd strongly considering putting something in your app for assignments. Not sure if you're aware, but, Bookshare now has a way for teachers, educators, etc to assign a book to a student. So, for example, if a unit on The great Gatsby was going to be started, the teacher, or the student's vision teacher could assign the book to them. It would appear somewhere in that student's account, and they could go get it. Not sure how this would work, because I've never used it. This feature was not around when I was in school.
4. I also think it's important that you include a feature to allow people to browse reading lists. Both lists that they've made, and one's that Bookshare has created. Also, it might be cool to have a feature for creating reading lists in there too if possible. Or at the very least, creating a reading list on the site:, and then having it show up in Bookshare downloader.
Here's why I think this would be important. Bookshare has something they call Special collections. Names of special collections include collections devoted to award-winning authors and books, and the New York Times bestsellers' collections. These special collections are also reading lists, that you can unsubscribe from, and subscribe to.
Which, by the way, would be nice to have also.
Now, here's a list of features I'd like to see, outside of this.
1. First, let's start with browsing. What I'd like to see is something I don't have except on the Bookshare website. The ability to click on the name of an author, and look at all books by that author on the collection. This is really helpful in a series situation. I can see whether Bookshare has say book 2 in a series after I got done reading the 1st one, and loved it. Having a link or button or link to click on for that would be o so nice.
Last, I have a suggestion you could implement the download options. So, you could have this either after the book, in the search results, within the book, or both. I prefer both. What I'd suggest for downloading, is to have a download button for people to click, and then a list of options for file types. Then people could click on the one they want, and boom! You're done. Or, you could do a similar thing except with one thing. Instead of having a download button, and then options to choose from, have a button for each file type. For example, you'd have a download BRF format, download Epub format, etc. They'd be separate buttons. A button for each file type.
I'm sorry for the long comment, but, I wanted to give you my thoughts on the idea, as well as some suggestions for features that you may want to think about including, for people, students, teachers, etc, since I know you have a separate version of Speech Central for schools. I'm not sure how something like this would work for a school, but, this would be popular with schools, because, there's a lot of students in any level of education, from elementary to grad school who use Bookshare, for school and pleasure reading. I was one of those students in my public school days, and I have no doubt that I'll be the same way when I go to college.
I look forward to seeing what comes next for Speech Central, as well as what becomes of this app! :-)
As I've said, I'd be happy to beta test it.
Great idea!
I would definitely be interested. I use Voice Dream Reader to download and read bookshare books, and I love it, but I think your app would have more features. It would be nice to not have to download a book again simply because you need it on a different device. Thank you!
Thanks for feedback
I appreciate those comments, they were really good.
First to make it clear there is no official Bookshare API 2, it only exists at the experimental level that is not ready for the real world. I am not sure what VDR support means. Currently there is only new authentication officially supported in Bookshare API 2 and while it might be better from the technical backend and security perspective, from the accessibility point it is a huge step backward. Implementing this means that you will have to log in through the Bookshare website instead of using the app accessible dialogs and there are no immediate benefits.
My initial idea was just to decouple the Bookshare download from Speech Central app. As said it would bring benefit of easier importing to many apps that currently don't support Bookshare and the other benefit is that my app and its updates and Apple approval wouldn't ever depend on the 3rd party which knows to be extremely unreliable for developers like me (in the worst case not answering email at all).
Initial idea was to make everything else for the 'future' except for the file format picker. That future would depend on how much there is interest in this initial effort.
However after reading this I do agree that it might be a good idea to see if I can offer a higher level of features at the very start. As they say you can only once make the first impression.
And just for the record as far as I remember what I implemented you can currently list Bookshare charts in Speech Central. It should be somewhere in the bottom toolbar initially.
Please do this
This would be amazing since I use Bookshare a lot. Would love it if this becomes an app. Thank you so much for thinking of this idea. :-)