New York City (Monday April 6, 2009)

The Association of Blind Citizens, ABC, will produce a live webcast of
the Reading Rights Coalition, RRC,  protest being held at The Authors
Guild in New York City.  The webcast will begin on Tuesday April 7th
between 11:45 A.M. and 12:00 P.M. EDT

Listeners around the world can access the web page:
http://blindcitizens.org/live
which has information and links for listening to the live event.  It is
recommended that you access this web page prior to the event so that you
can install the Talking Communities conference  web browser component in
advance.  A flash based and mp3 stream may also be available at the
above web address.

The Reading Rights Coalition is a joint effort made up of 27
organizations representing upwards of 15 million Americans who are blind
or otherwise  unable to readily use traditional print.  RRC
organizations and members will collectively protest the discriminatory
separate but not equal stance of the Authors Guild as it relates to
Ebooks and the Amazon Kindle  2 text to speech audio feature.

"The water company does not charge separate rates for the use of water
depending on whether the consumer is drinking it or using it to wash
dishes; it simply charges for the amount of water used. By the same
token, an e-book is not inherently visual or aural, and to claim that
reading it either visually or aurally should cost a different price is
discriminatory."
http://readingrights.org

The RRC web site, above, has in depth information regarding the protest,
an electronic petition, and other background and resource material.  .

The board of directors of NFB of Massachusetts, ABC, as well as all RRC
organizations collectively, encourage you to sign the online petition,
attend the protest in person or virtually, and sign up on the RRC web
page to receive action alerts and updates.  We urge you to widely
circulate this information to your email contacts, personal and
professional networks, and on vehicles such as Facebook and Twitter.

Contact:
Mika Pyyhkala
Vice President
Association of Blind Citizens
Google Voice/SMS: (617) 202-3497
[log in to unmask]
Micro Blog: http://twitter.com/pyyhkala


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