[Mn-abs] Op-Ed regarding Kindle Issue

[Jennifer Dunnam]

FYI.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.blind14apr14,0,2676842.story

Bias against blind book lovers
  By Marc Maurer
  April 14, 2009 
I love to read, and I've been doing it ever since I was able. My wife is also an avid reader. But my wife and I are blind, and because I lead the Baltimore-based National Federation of the Blind, we have many blind friends. And although many of us read everything we can get our hands on, we can't get our hands on very much to read.

There are services for us, of course. Government entities and nonprofit organizations convert books into Braille, audio, or digital form for our use. But only 5 percent of all books published undergo such a conversion. A few more are available as commercial audio books, but these are often abridged, and those that are unabridged are quite expensive.

Nowadays, a solution to the problem of reading material is tantalizingly within our reach: the e-book. When Amazon released its new Kindle 2 e-book reader earlier this year, it announced that the device now includes text-to-speech software and can read e-books aloud. Those of us who are blind were filled with joy at this news. For the first time in history, it would now be possible, we hoped, for the blind to do something that everyone else takes for granted: purchase a brand new book and start reading it right away.

Our hope quickly turned to despair, however - and then to anger. The Authors Guild doesn't want the Kindle 2 to be able to read books aloud. They say this new capability violates authors' copyrights. This argument has absolutely no basis in copyright law. Reading a print book aloud or having it read aloud to you in the privacy of your home is not a copyright violation; the only difference with the Kindle 2 is that a machine rather than a human being is doing the reading.

In the face of this specious attack from the Authors Guild, Amazon initially took the legally and morally correct position that the text-to-speech feature of the Kindle 2 did not violate copyright law. But then the company backed down, saying it would allow authors and publishers to decide which books they would permit to be read aloud by the device. Dismayed, we contacted the Authors Guild. It claimed it did not oppose having e-books read aloud to the blind, as long as there was a national registry of blind people who would then be allowed to unlock the text-to-speech feature.

This is wrong. The Authors Guild has no right to discriminate against disabled readers by segregating us into a separate and unequal class. If our sighted friends don't have to "sign up" to be permitted to read, then blind people shouldn't either. And once we buy a book, how we read it is nobody's business but ours. When we told the Authors Guild this, they added insult to injury by telling us that, if we wouldn't sign up for a registry, we would just have to pay extra in order to use text-to-speech. Needless to say, this is outrageous and reprehensible behavior from an organization of people who claim to support equal access to literature by all Americans. Instead of facilitating the free flow of information, the Authors Guild is making itself the arbiter of who is worthy of access to the printed word.

The Authors Guild isn't just discriminating against blind people. People with other disabilities - especially brain injuries and conditions like dyslexia - would also benefit from the ability to have books read aloud to them electronically. Groups representing many of these people are joining us to protest the position of the Authors Guild and Amazon's craven response to it.

At present, very few of us buy books in any form. If we could have e-books read aloud to us, however, we would happily pay for them. We are an untapped market consisting of some 15 million people to which authors and publishers have never before had direct access. For this reason, the position of the Authors Guild is not only morally repugnant but also bad business. Prohibiting the blind and others from reading commercially available e-books just means that authors and publishers won't get our money. The guild's position hurts both authors and people with print disabilities.

In an age when how we get information is constantly and rapidly changing, it's important that people with disabilities have access to it in the same way that it is important for us to have access to physical structures, goods and services. Amazon took an important step in the right direction by including a read-aloud feature on the Kindle 2, but the Authors Guild is now trying to set us back. We are not going to allow them to stand in the doorway of the virtual bookstore to keep us out.

Marc Maurer is president of the National Federation of the Blind. His e-mail is officeofthepresident at nfb.org.