This article runs in the Tech Update section of today's New York Times.

Upgrade for Blind Borrowers of Audiobooks

     By IAN AUSTEN

     L IKE many Americans who are blind, when Lucille Uttermohlen doesn't
     feel like curling up with a bulky book in Braille, she turns to
     audiobooks that come from the National Library Service for the Blind
     and Physically Handicapped, part of the Library of Congress.

     "When I lost my vision when I was 16, I was so happy to find out that
     there was a program that still allowed me to read," said Ms.
     Uttermohlen, who is now 50 and practices family law in Monticello,
     Ind.

     But the technology used by the National Library Service for people
     like Ms. Uttermohlen has more in common with the era of "Starsky and
     Hutch" than it does with the age of downloaded digital information.
     Most of the service's 600,000 users rely on four-track cassette tape
     players that were designed in the 1970's. While advanced for their
     time, the players are bulky (they're deliberately rugged to help them
     withstand repeated trips through the mail), have finicky rechargeable
     batteries and often vary in sound quality.

     Terri Uttermohlen of Baltimore, Lucille Uttermohlen's younger sister,
     who is also sightless, abandoned the system about a year and a half
     ago.

     "I found the tapes frustrating at times," Terri Uttermohlen said. "The
     sound quality isn't consistent. And I also found myself getting all
     excited at the end of Side 4 but forgetting where I set down the box
     containing Side 5."

     The library service has been frustrated, too. But now, thanks in part
     to the changing economics of the electronics industry, it has decided
     to switch to a digital system over the next four years.

     "We wanted something that's really tough, something that's really easy
     to handle and something we can afford," said Michael Moodie, the
     National Library Service's deputy director. "We really didn't have
     that until this summer."

     That, Mr. Moodie said, was when price predictions for flash memory
     reached a point that fit with the library's budget.

     "Flash is wonderful," Mr. Moodie said. "It had all the requirements we
     need for the last four or five years except price."

     Mr. Moodie said the service, which was established in 1931, has a long
     history of technology innovations.

     Its first audiobook, issued in 1934, was also the world's first 33 1/3
     r.p.m. long-playing record. (The service has a special exemption from
     copyright laws that allows it to record books and periodicals without
     royalty payments.) Columbia records did not introduce the first LP for
     musical recordings, using a slightly different technology, until 1948.
     But because the Library of Congress distributed 98 percent of the
     recordings through the mail, the bulk and weight of even LP technology
     was a problem. A user wanting to hear "Gone With the Wind," for
     example, was confronted with 80 records. In 1958, that stack was
     reduced by the introduction of 16 2/3 r.p.m. records. The last gasp of
     records came in 1973 with 8 1/3 r.p.m.

     In the 1980's the service avoided a digital technology that most of
     the world adopted, compact discs. "CD's would have been a step
     backward," Mr. Moodie said.

     The first strike against CD's, he said, was that they are limited to
     74 minutes of audio. Because the library's mono tapes contain four
     completely separate audio tracks and play at a slower speed than
     conventional cassette players, they hold up to six hours. Handling
     CD's without scratching them or loading them into a player the right
     way could be difficult for some blind people.

     The next steps in converting to flash memory will be designing a
     player and setting technical standards. Unlike most digital audio
     players, the library's device must have controls that can be easily
     manipulated by users with arthritis. Because data representing voice
     recordings can be compressed more than music, Mr. Moodie said the new
     flash memory cards, which will use a standard U.S.B. connection, will
     easily hold a single book regardless of length.

     Terri Uttermohlen said that when the library service's new system is
     available, she will give it a try. In the meantime she gets her
     digital audiobooks through a different method. She downloads text,
     either from the Library of Congress Web Braille server or from
     Bookshare, a subscription Web site for disabled people that offers
     books in a variety of formats, including a digital form of Braille.
     She then uses a speech synthesis program in a hand-held computer to
     play the books back as audio.

     One advantage to this approach, she said, is that the computer can
     read at a very rapid, if mechanical, pace.

     "I often find the human readers are too slow," she said.

     One drawback, however, is that many of the publications in Bookshare
     are scanned from print editions using computers, leading to problems
     with unusual book designs or typography. Cookbooks, in particular, can
     be a challenge.

     "When it says 'Bake at 2,500 degrees,' you know that it has read the
     degree symbol as a zero," she said.


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