According to reports from MediaMemo, NPR is removing all traces of Adobe Flash, which powers its website’s media and graphics, from its iPad-only version. Although many news organizations use Flash to display multimedia presentations and audio and video content, NPR in particular was going to be heavily affected by Apple’s refusal to support Flash on the new iPad devices. That’s because a key feature on NPR’s website is its Flash-based audio player, something that’s featured on nearly every webpage site-wide.

Kinsey Wilson, senior vice president and general manager of NPR Digital Media, recently told Poynter that their developers decided to work around the problem by implementing an HTML5-based player instead. Wilson also noted that the company has a “launch sponsor” for the iPad-only site, since it won’t be able to support web ads, which are often coded in Flash.

Yesterday on NPR, I heard novelist Neil Gaiman ask, is an audiobook really a book? He paraphrased Harold Bloom on behalf of the naysayers: “You need the whole cognitive process, that part of you which is open to wisdom. You need the text in front of you.”

Gaiman followed Bloom’s judgment with his own: “I find that astonishingly unconvincing. I think you can have a close and perfectly valid relationship with the text when you hear it.”

Then audio book director Rick Harris insisted that he wants the experience to be different:

It is not a book. An audiobook is a separate entity. A novel can be seen as many things, and one of the things it can be seen as is a script for an audio performance. But it is another thing; it is an audiobook that has its own validity, its own limitations, its own strengths. The human voice is unquestionably the most expressive musical instrument there is. Combine those two and you get an audiobook.

To my great surprise, I found myself nodding at this like a Bobble-head. I think commercial audiobooks are something different, not just from printed books, but also from the books I read that were recorded for the National Library Service for the Blind. The production values that commercial publishers foist onto “audio performances” are, well, cheesy. The abridgments, the musical interludes with 101 strings, the histrionic characterizations by overwrought actors — such dramaturgy imposes interpretations on the text that cut the reader out of it.

So the litmus test for determining when a book is a book isn’t whether you see or listen. It’s whether your “relationship” with the text is really yours.

[See Listening to the Literacy Events of a Blind Rader for an academic perspective on how I read Thomas Kuhn’s  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.]

So I removed the embed code here. Does anyone have any inisghts/suggestions?

Who’s Laura? The new VA from Microsoft. Eric Horvitz extolled her virtues this morning on NPR. Since Laura is still in development, let me place my custom order in advance. Booking airline reservations would be nice, but I don’t need to be nagged about blowing off deadlines. I want a virtual assistant who understands my accessibility needs and can hack text and code like an administrative professional killing snakes. Except that’s just a metaphor, in case you don’t do nuanced tonality yet. Really, I like snakes. You’ll have to do a lot of reading to me, so I’d love a voice  that purrs like Catherine Deneuve selling the proverbial bath oil.  And you can skip the ice-cube persona. I want the passion of Delacroix’s Liberty leading the people over the barricades!