I found this under the "Books Section" of the blindkiss.com site and thought
some might find it interesting.  U. S. residents can now join bookshare.org
in order to comply with copyright rules.

BlindKiss - Jumping Through Hoops Just To Read a Book
Jumping Through Hoops Just To Read A Book

by Snuffles

Blind people in the UK have a frustrating, unsatisfactory and now often
ILLEGAL relationship with books. We cannot read the print format paperbacks
and
hardbacks that book store shelves are heavily laden with. It's well known
that blind people currently rely on Braille and audio format books to
consume
everything from literary works and information through to magazines and
trashy romance novels.

It is widely assumed that every book that is produced is also somehow
produced in Braille and on audio format and blind people thus enjoy the same
range
of books and contemporary cultural materials as sighted people. This is not
the case, not by a long chalk ... not by a long long long long long long
long
long long long chalky bit of chalked up chalk.

The new craze is to scan books into text formats and then share them with
people all over the Internet, it's illegal but it's a key part of blind
culture
now and spreading like wildfire. Starved of books, blind people have a
strong disregard for copyright ... this proliferation of scanned texts could
easily
undermine the emergence of the E-Book industry.

Let me just explain how I, a blind person, currently go about trying to get
hold of a contemporary book to read. It's likely that a new book would be
brought
to my attention either because it has been mentioned on a TV or radio show
or one of my friends or colleagues has raved about it. The next step is to
think
close to home, you hope it may already have been produced in braille or on
cassette by the bastions of the blind publishing industry, namely: The
National
Library for the Blind (Britain's biggest braille book producer) or perhaps
on RNIB's exclusive Talking Book format. These services are lending
libraries.
I don't know why I still bother trying these two roads because usually it
takes a good year or two for a book to reach these easy-to-hand formats, and
far more often that books don't make it into these formats at all. When they
do though, it is quite good because they are unabridged unlike the audio
books
you see on the shelves of book stores which are mostly heavily edited
containing only about 30% of the author's original word count. Blind people
on the
whole do not appreciate abridged books.

There are one or two other much smaller cassette book services for blind
people it should be noted (e.g. Calibre) who surprisingly can be far more up
to
date with their choice of titles, but lack of choice of contemporary titles
is still a major issue.

The next step is to call up Isis or Cover2Cover or The Talking Book shop in
London - or visit their respective websites. Again this usually ends in
disappointment
as unabridged books are rarely recorded on tape until some time after
publication of the print version, but again here, usually not at all. When
they are
available in this format it's a brilliant find because they are read very
well by paid professional actors whereas some books on other services are
read
by stumbling or unanimated volunteers.

It should be noted at this point that blind people do not expect access to
books for free! No, rather the situation is such that blind people will
routinely
pay around 40 pounds for an unabridged audio book rather than not read it at
all. This is at least 6 times more expensive than a bog standard paperback
book filling the shelves of Waterstones in abundance. With 70% of blind men
unemployed and 90% of blind women, they have a lot of leisure time but
little
money. Reasonably priced access to books then would seem a rather important
consideration.

So, after all that, if I still want to read the book I have to get a friend
to read it aloud to me or resort to technology. I have a scanner hooked up
to
my PC and if I feel inclined I can go out, buy a book and then laboriously
scan the book onto my hard disk page by page by page. This is an imprecise
way
of getting a digital text version of a book, will always miss out words,
have spelling mistakes, misread 3's as E's, 5's as S's and I's as l's, and
some
fonts it jus can't cope with. But all that aside, it can take upwards of 5
to 8 solid hours of repetitive page lining up, keyboard pressing, the
inevitable
computer crashing, repetitive  repetitive  repetitive strain and boredom
syndrome taking up an entire working day. This kind of computer setup will
cost
a couple of thousand pounds. All this effort and expense results in an
imperfect digital document that sighted people could have wandered into
Waterstones
and grabbed in a fraction of a lunch hour, for a fraction of the price and
then opened and read on the tube on the way home.

NLB produces around 500 braille books a year currently (compared to the 100
thousand published print books yearly) and after many decades of the
existence
of RNIB Talking Book there are still less than 13 thousand titles to choose
from.

These two organisations are charities though and cannot necessarily be
criticised for the small number of titles they produce in comparison to
print publications.
however the choice of titles they publish ought to be closely questioned.
The people who decide what books should be published in Braille and talking
book
are our cultural gatekeepers, a role of extraordinary importance. Their
choice dictates what blind people get to read. They control our education as
well
as our cultural intake. Marx would have referred to these media
producers/gatekeepers as "the owners of the means of production of media for
blind people"
or something like that. An awesome and powerful role to have.

Fantastically though, there is a general sense that E-Books are on the
horizon. Blind people are very computer literate, accessing computers using
speech
synthesizers and Braille displays. The Internet has been a godsend, we can
now all access and read daily newspapers for instance as well as a wealth of
other materials. So, it would seem that E-Books would be the answer: publish
an E-Book and both sighted and blind people will be able to access it.
Unfortunately
the software manufacturers and big publishing companies are in danger of
giving blind people little or no access to many of the eBook systems
springing
up. Although it's accepted blind people cant read old-fashioned print and
paper books, there is no reason in the world why blind people shouldn't have
full access to all eBooks. If blind people were excluded in any way, this
would be a travesty extraordinaire and quite difficult to understand or deal
with if you happen to be blind.

In the meantime, as publishers sort out their little secure non-pirateable
methods of E-Publishing, blind people are illegally sharing the books they
have
painstakingly scanned onto their computers - as described earlier. It's a
blind Napster, it's the starved of books equivalent to the "have you got any
good stuff" talk from drug users. Why bother spending a whole day scanning a
book onto your computer when someone else somewhere in the world has done
it already? Book sharing across the Internet is now an integral part of
blind culture. There are no copyright protection methods on these manually
scanned
eTexts, not like the E-Book formats currently have. Blind people can freely
share their book files with no problem at all. In America www.bookshare.org
facilitates this process to an extent, literally a kind of Napster sharing
mechanism for blind people. It won't take long before these eTexts spread
into
the wider world and publishers through excluding blind people from their
eBook plans are effectively shooting themselves in the foot as more and more
books
are being illegally hurled around the Internet without any money changing
hands and no consideration for the rights of the author. Why should blind
people
care about publishers rights if they don't care about ours?

There have been some recent attempts to fix the access difficulties blind
people have with current eBook formats, however they are not entirely
satisfactory.
The sometimes ridiculous workarounds that have been produced by the likes of
Microsoft Bookreaderr have attempted to provide an 'add on', a speech synth
file which is so painfully slow to read that an E-version of War and Peace
would likely not be finished before the end of the current War Against
Terrorism.

In the future, the traditional mass Braille and tape publishing for blind
people may be shunted to one side in this E-Book age. The braille and tape
producers
would not have quite the same important role as the responsibility for blind
people's access to books moves squarely into the hands of the big publishers
in conjunction with the big software houses producing the 'reading
software'. it will be the mainstream publishers who determine whether they
make their
books accessible in E-Formats or not, so in a few years time it will be they
who will be receiving my gate keeping anxiety allegations.

If we are to be included, we must be included at the core giving us access
to the basic text that sighted people are also accessing, not some cute
well-meaning
(or fearful?) version that gives blind people only a half access. if this is
not seriously addressed, blind people will continue to scan and share making
texts widely open and available to almost anyone. How ironic that the shoe
may now be on the other foot and publishers might have to take blind people
seriously in future. Oh and lets not forget that this is not an act of
goodwill, arguably it's a point of law and also blind people are a rather
big potential
market for E-Books. Do publishers want our money or our wrath? Our wrath
could seriously affect their bottom line in the new dawn of E-Texts.

You can

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