Reading in the dark - My comments on the Washington Post article "Keep the Books Talking"
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10:30 am
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My comments on the Washington Post article "Keep the Books Talking"
Kes: I'm including my own commentary and explanation of the process of developing digital books and players in special formats after the WP blurb.
Posted to
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/29/AR2007052901736.html
Keep the Books Talking
Congress should fund the digitization of a vital audio library for the blind.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007; Page A12
AHALF-MILLION Americans stand in danger of losing their public library. They are the nation's blind, and their library is Talking Books, through which the
National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped of the Library of Congress (NLS) provides 500,000 Americans with free audio recordings
of about as many books. Unlike the "books on tape" that are sold at retail bookstores, these recordings are unabridged, extensive and diverse -- and are
designed for people who have no other way of reading print.
Unfortunately, today's Talking Books technology is ready to meet its maker. The program currently uses half-speed audiotapes that patrons listen to on special
devices. These tape players, like the Talking Books record players that preceded them, are obsolete, and are no longer even being manufactured. To bring
the program into the 21st century, the NLS hopes to digitize its entire library and create new players. It has spent 17 years researching, building and
testing new products, and it is ready to manufacture a fully accessible flash-drive player. The Library of Congress has asked Congress to appropriate about
$76.4 million to produce the players and digitize thousands more books.
A forthcoming Government Accountability Office report, however, may derail the NLS's plans. In a draft version of the report completed several weeks ago,
the GAO faulted the NLS for not considering existing commercial products such as CD players and iPods instead of creating a new device. This sounds like
a reasonable concern, given tales of exorbitant government spending on $792 doormats and $400 hammers. But creating special, noncommercial players is crucial
to the continued existence of Talking Books. Commercially available products, which often use visual screens and are not labeled in Braille, are not accessible
to the visually impaired. More important, to comply with U.S. copyright law, Talking Books can record and distribute only audio books that cannot be played
by commercial devices.
Should the GAO keep this misguided criticism in its final report, lawmakers should not be swayed by it. Instead, Congress should fully fund Talking Books'
digital upgrade, a project that will grant many disabled Americans the same literary access afforded to the sighted.
Kes: Posted to the Washington Post Web site yesterday, this very short commentary does not begin to do justice to the incredibly complex system that is special format books. For instance, the first thing which is considered in special format books is the design of the play device and the level of DRM (digital rights management) that can be designed into the player. This design process can--and does--take years, and that design process is influenced by the approval of the publishers whose material the NLS hopes to distribute to its consumers.
After the design of the player device and the DRM issues comes the additional design considerations for usability. A large portion of NLS users are elderly, many are not tech savvy, and many many more are not just visually impaired by have mobility impairments, which means the elements of the player, such as stop/start/eject buttons, must be intuitive and easy to use (unlike the tiny switches and buttons on most media devices nowadays, which I myself often find difficult to locate and--as someone with arthritis--sometimes difficult to manipulate).
By this time, a lot of the design of the disc or whatever will actually have the recording of the book itself on it is already mostly shaped by the design of the player device, but once again, the DRM considerations require that the medium not be easily copyable (yes, i know, all my geek friends are begin to chuckle knowingly, but you've all heard Cory Doctorow talk about this in regard to mainstream media so I will just remind you this means "the average user"). The way Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic does this is to use separate mp3s for each section of the digital book, but the software media player includes an encryption/decryption algorhithim that descrambles the alphanumeric filenames on the hundreds of mp3s that compose a single book.
Additionally, both the RFBD and the NLS sometimes use passwords or pin numbers which the user must enter in order to gain access to the materials. In the case of RFBD, it is a pin number one must enter every time one opens the ebooks, in the case of the NLS it is a password one must enter to gain access to the downloadable materials from the NLS Web site. Finally, there are sometimes fingerprints of your downloading activity/history, or, in the case of the NLS, another layer which requires the user to agree to not be a bad person and illegally copy or distribute the materials one is getting access to.
So you see where this may cost a bit of money, and why a lot of that money has nothing to do with transferring the books to digital format or purchasing over-the-counter memory sticks or other USB devices. Of course, a lot of this process emerges as being both political and economic, as anyone who has the money is going to opt for a commercial source of digital books like Audible.com or Amazon.com, which gives you a lot more choice in both book variety and how you access the digital books. I've gotten less and less patient with the restriction special formats place on me, and so I tend to talk a lot more about teh etexts I am reading, or the Audibe audiobook, or the scanned copy of a book, but for a lot of people, these alternatives are not physicaly or economically possible, and this includes people who are homebound and/or living on very very limited incomes.
All this is to try to unpack some of the very complex issues which rarely get mentioned in these tiny little commentaries on digital ebooks in special formats.
Tags: drm, ebooks, nls
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Outstanding distillation of the many complexities of special formats.
One point I wish someone would make is that the NLS managed to avoid CDs altogether -- I don't know if that was by chance or choice -- and that has turned out to be a great thing. In my experience, cassettes are much sturdier than CDs. I always prefer even ten-year-old cassette editions of mass-market audiobooks over brand new CD versions when I get them from the library.
Talking books were the first application of recording tech. Members of congress who are thrilled with their new iPod-compatible sports cars need to chill and trust the experts, eh? |
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