Audio version of The Ruin and The Bee Tree? Use the Kindle or IPad Audible Audiobooks

My Aunt Vee who turns 97 on 9/11 and who is blind relies on technology for her reading material. She has a better memory than I do, is confined to an electric wheelchair and wheels about her assisted living facility in Billings, Montana like the matriarch of the Fenter family that she is. Her blindness is the result of Macular Degeneration which gives her slight peripheral vision so she can make out just enough of her surroundings that she can navigate.

Her sons have fixed her up with a program through the state that provide her the resources available to those like her whose access to the world is through her auditory rather than visual sense, the talking book.

I suggested to them the Kindle with sound enabled and was told that the kindle had been disabled by the major publishers because they had the resources to hire actors to record their works on audio. Too bad for us independent publishers who don't have that kind of resource. Of course, I could sit down and record it myself. An an earlier age, I would have found that a challenge. My radio days ended years ago, however and I don't find that a challenge anymore.

Today, however, when I checked my e-mail, I got a note from Amazon advertising a new feature called Audible Audiobooks. That led me to do a little digging.

I found that when Apple released the IPad 1 they didn't go along with the request to disable the audio function on their e-book function and if you use the "voice-over" function of the device, it will read the e-book to you. So in effect turning your kindle download or any other e-book download into an audio book. The Audioble Audiobooks program is to enable the audio function in the first generation Kindle. Apparently the second, third, generation Kindles have been able to read the book aloud. I don't have a Kindle, so I can't verify all that. What I read was that the publisher had to choose whether to allow their content to be audible or not. If that is the case, I don't remember being given that choice when uploading my books. If it was there, I would not have checked to disable it as I had no intent of creating an audio book in the near future.

So there you have it. If you try it works, contact me so I can pass the word along to my Aunt Vee who can finally hear my book. Thanks.

Kenneth Fenter

View YouTube videos of Atlatl the weapon used in The Ruin by Kenneth Fenter

I checked out the Trailer for The Ruin that I posted on YouTube this summer (Ruin Trailer) and found that quite a few videos of the atlatl are linked to the Trailer. It was really interesting to watch them. One was on the history of the atlatl going back to the Aztec. The name "atlatl" comes from the Aztec. In The Ruin, Cliff the main character makes an atlatl, spear thrower, from a pamphlet he has picked up at Mesa Verde National Park. He learns to use the weapon to hunt rabbits and even brings down a deer with it.

There are fine examples of the atlatl that the Ancestral Puebloans used in the museum at Mesa Verde National Park and at the Anasazi Cultural Center at Dolores Colorado.



Atlatl at the museum at Mesa Verde National Park.



Atlatl in a case at the Anasazi Cultural Center at Dolores Colorado.

Kenneth Fenter