[blindlaw] Why print-disabled people should thankthe AuthorsGuild...

[Angie Matney]

Hi James,

Actually, it's the authors guild, not publishers, who are objecting. And
from what I've seen, the Authors Guild is thought of as extremist by many
authors. Some publishers have made blog posts condemning the Authors Guild
for its actions.


Angie


-----Original Message-----
From: blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of James Pepper
Sent: Monday, April 06, 2009 1:16 AM
To: NFBnet Blind Law Mailing List
Subject: Re: [blindlaw] Why print-disabled people should thankthe
AuthorsGuild...

The author of that blog is an expert in making textbooks accessible to the
blind for the state of Georgia and Maryland.  Robert Martinengo.  He
actually is on the side of accessibility and he makes a point, you are going
to have to deal with the copyright holders.

Right now publishers convert books to Daisy but they are the ones doing it
and Kindle did this work without their permission.  They just did it and
created a new format for publication without asking anyone, without
receiving any permission from the publishers to take their content and make
it readable in this format.

Kindle is not the only format out there and given the recent developments in
making Talking books we are going to see a lot more content.

I think that if everyone would calm down about this and just directly poll
the publishers you may find that as long as they are not pushed into this,
they will continue to create Daisy Books.  They have enough problems right
now with sales.

And what I do not understand is why anyone would be against Kindle because
the books are not free, you have to pay for them, so with Kindle they would
get a royalty on converting books to be accessible.
In Daisy format they have to do this at their own expense.

Of course the flip side of all of this is that publishers have always had
the option to not publish their work.  It is their work.  So there needs to
be an attitude in all of this of negotiation because providing books in
Daisy format has been a voluntary effort and they could easily go back to
the days of straight text files, unformatted but compliant to Section 508
regulations, instead of formatted Daisy, Talking books or Kindle.

James Pepper
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