First, let me re-iterate my main point that the ingenuity and availability of Bookshare.org, digital talking book formats, and reading appliances provided me, and others, the humanitarian lift it takes to overcome otherwise devastating loss of continuity of productivity and enjoyment of life. This contrasts with the inhuman loss of health insurance coverage for pre-existing conditions between Cobra and Medicare imposed by the the U.S. system as well as the marketplace reality of extra costs of assistive technology for individual Vision Losers like me. The latter conditions make every advantage and opportunity seem more precious.

Let me paraphrase to see if I understand your point that the copyright exemption breaks the consumer-producer chain in ways that further undermine publisher incentives to develop a technology and associated dissemination system for which print-disabled people are a special case. Since publication is essentially electronic most print materials are only one technology step away from the model of book reading by synthetic voice using a reading appliance. There must be pricing structure that would work for print-disabled people and might furthermore entice the general population who could prefer a listening-reading model, just as audio books do now. With a broader market print-disabled people would have more choices at possibly reasonable prices.

Of course, textbook types of material with technical content (equations, graphics, etc.) present more publication challenges than novels and philosophy texts and have more confined user base. As a former college teacher, I saw cost of textbooks factored into students’ appreciation of the subject matter and instructor quality. Ouch, but off-topic.

Having crossed over into the synthetic voice model of reading and rebuilt my personal library this way, I often feel a bit smug, feeling that I’m using more advanced technology than my still working (and insured) friends who buy or borrow print books. Indeed, I’m a believer in the adage that “improvements for accessibility eventually benefit everybody” so the print-disabled are early adopters whose experience will have wider applicability.

What can I personally do? I’ve bought books I read through bookshare as gifts for friends. I tried unsuccessfully to track down a privately published book author to send a check. I make referrals to friends and other book readers, including a librarian. I’d be glad to participate in a micropayment system to compensate publishers and authors. I nag organizations like the National Academy Press and individual book authors to donate their books or at least think through accessibility issues. And I try to put my reading knowledge to work in technology development as well as parenting and personal survival.

So, what is a print-disabled reader to do on a broader scale? and I’m not asking rhetorically. What would I be doing if I lived in France or Canada or Australia or wherever? How can the U.S. system be enlightened by the policies and organizations around the world? I’ll be doing my own research on this question to address in a future posting.

Very interesting and somewhat disturbing comment — thanks.

Slger

Thanks for this perspective on Bookshare. I work primarily on getting college textbooks into formats that ‘print-disabled’ students can read. I have been doing this for about 10 years, and have come to the conclusion that the copyright exemption that you refer to, passed in 1996, may now be doing more harm than good.

Bookshare, RFB&D, the NLS, and other agencies that republish books in accessible formats without permission from publishers or royalties to authors are obscuring the real market for this material. The copyright exemption created a second-class status for so-called ’specialized formats’, which means that all Bookshare titles are a sort of gray media, restricted to a specific, medically-bound group of readers, even if the publisher were to issue an accessible edition themselves.

Think about the O’Reilly books you mentioned. What, exactly, is stopping O’Reilly from selling their books in an accessible format? Surely the publisher of highly technical books on XML does not have to partner with a small non-profit agency to figure out how to sell an accessible book to a disabled person. In effect, O’Reilly has outsourced you, and other print-disabled potential customers, to a charitable agency. The copyright exemption seems like it leads to segregation, rather than inclusion.

So, after reading about what other countries have done to address this issue, I have proposed my own copyright exemption. You can find it here: http://accessiblemedia.wordpress.com/

I recognize that no one is eager to make any changes to the existing law that would threaten their position, but someday, maybe not too far off, such a revision will become necessary. The sad thing is, publishers already wasted a lot of money on electronic products very few people wanted to buy, when the real core market for electronic books, which is people who can’t read print books, still goes mostly under the radar.

Regards,
Bob Martinengo