Magazines

I see that Fictionwise has subscriptions to e-versions of several of the magazines I actually read.

I started out reading Asimov’s Science Fiction back in 1994 or so, because they offered it in Braille. When they switched to cassette versions of the magazine, I quit reading. In fact, though I picked up the subscription to Asimov’s again on tape, I haven’t been listening to them despite my good intentions. Why, you may ask? My blind readers totally know what I’m going to say.

That’s right, the narrators.

The National Library Service for the Blind’s magazine narration department seems, at least to me, to be comprised of people who are either just starting out, or who the powers that Be knows would cause a normally sane, healthy adult to want to shove an icepick up their nose just to aleviate the pain of listening to these people. Sadly, some of these narrators have gone on to reading actual books, which is why I read ebooks now.

Anyway, I am thinking of picking up subscriptions to at least Asimov’s and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction through fictionwise. Because it’s far easier for me to ignore the synthesized speech from my computer or the dulcet tones of Crystal, the speech engine I use to listen to books I record onto MP3. Crystal sounds almost human, but still machine-like enough that it’s easy to ignore her quirks. Real humans don’t uniformly have the same quirks, and their quirks tend to involve things like talking out their noses or stumbling over or mispronouncing words.