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DAISY Player plugin pack - call for collaboration
Hi, I'm new to these forums so excuse me if i'm off track, please correct me if this is the wrong spot. I work at Nota, a Danish national library producing and offering DAISY books, especially for blind and dyslectic readers. It doesn't take much time to learn, that most of our users rarely uses the books DAISY capabilities due to the lack of flexible players. Mostly our users stay with their accustomed soft- and hardware, i.e iTunes, Winmediaplayer, iPod or other mobile mp3 player etc. For these players, DAISY formatted books are in most cases superflous, if not more difficult to tackle than standard audio books. I am aware that the scope of creating standards is not necessarily tied to the task of producing interpreting software. But maybe it's time developers in the many organisations involved with DAISY got together to move the format closer to the end-users?
Basically there is an unfulfilled need for the end-user to play DAISY books in his favourite mediaplayer and browser. I am aware that this might be a both blurry and ever changing category, but still there is a well-defined set of apps, standards and devices outthere that we know for certain are dominating heavily in the area of importing, organising and playing multimediafiles. In our small IT group at Nota, we continously produce our own sollutions - presently a web-based DAISY player - and I bet other organisations are doing the same. In the long run this is not benefitting the end-user. Locally produced software can only fill minor gaps in the customer needs, and will never be able to lift the DAISY standard much further - maybe even into the general end-user market? With a common effort however, it would be possible to plug-in to the major software vendors, supplying a fledged 'DAISY pack' allowing end-users to play and navigate full featured DAISY books in their favourite mediaplayers, browsers and devices.
A project like this would not nescessarily cost a lot of money, basically it demands collaborative effort.
Anyone interested?
Best,
Simon Moe

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