I hope you had a wonderful holiday season and your new year is off to a great start.
Work has already begun for me and I have delved into the bowels of mobile tablet technology to research some lingering issues with audio on mobile devices. As much as technology has progressed, there are still many sticky wickets.
The Yeath trilogy uses audio to play music in the books from several internet sources. One of those sources is YouTube. I have discovered that YouTube has a policy that it does not want videos to play in the background on mobile devices. As soon as you touch your icon to get to the home desktop or the icon to see your running apps, it pauses the video. This is extremely frustrating when one needs to read the book while listening to the audio part of the video.
There is no fix and no solution on the horizon. There were three apps that played YouTube files that had this problem solved, but YouTube caught up to them and forced them to adhere to the same insanity. In my opinion, it was done to kill the three developers. One app is no longer available on Google Play.
Because of this restriction imposed by YouTube, I will continue to search for audio from other websites and no longer use YouTube as a source. Unfortunately, some of the music in the Yeath trilogy is not available in a place other than YouTube. You still have the option of purchasing the music from Amazon or iTunes if you need background audio while reading. Fortunately, there are only a few YouTube links in the books where this will be a problem. If you find another free source to play a piece of music used in one of my books, I would very much appreciate you notifying me about it. I can easily apply updates to the books on my website and will send you an updated version with the new link(s). With that said, I only use links to sites that adhere to music licenses and pay fees to the artists. I also do not use sites that require a person to subscribe to them with a username and password. Ease of use to paramount to the readers.
On another note, I have tried a few free eBook readers for Android 5 tablets and phones. I am finding a mixed bag. So far Moon+ Reader is the best, however, it forces you to see an ad for ten seconds when you close the book. I believe you can upgrade to the pro version for a small charge and it may eliminate the ads. Check into that first before taking my word for it. I have also tried the Aldiko reader app. Do not waste your time with that one. It cannot format correctly and cannot play the audio pronunciations in the appendix. It also only supports two eBook formats. There are many other reader apps one can use on their device. If you find that your default one does not do the job for you, look around for another app.
Happy reading!