[nabs-l] Where Do Textooks Come From?

[T. Joseph Carter]

Elizabeth,

Unfortunately, you cannot.  The publishers basically flatly refuse to 
deal with individual blind students.

Every single higher education publisher has a publishing rights 
office to sell permission to copy and reprint their property.  Almost 
all have a disability accommodations contact person or request form 
for a DSO to fill out on your behalf.

If your DSO is not contacting the publishers, they should be, and I 
can attempt to secure an updated database of publisher contacts for 
you to discuss with your university.

The problem is the next step:  You have to buy the book before most 
of the request forms will be accepted.  As it turns out, that's not 
quite true.  MOST publishers, even though they say that, will accept 
an agreement from the publisher to require you to provide them with 
proof of purchase before releasing the book to you as sufficient for 
that requirement.

There's a sort of workaround for the remaining publishers:  The DSO 
can purchase the book and use those details for the request, then 
have you purchase the book from them (or return it to the bookstore 
when you purchase yours), or something like that.  Whatever is 
needed.

Of course, even in California, publishers do not always have an 
electronic copy of the text to provide, leading to the chop and scan 
solution.  Of course, if you have a quality scanner and a good OCR 
package with a well-trained operator, I'm learning you can get 
reasonably good results from chop and scan for many books.  I've yet 
to see a DSO with a quality scanner, however.  Often student workers 
wind up doing the editing, and often they haven't got much training.

We're nowhere near an efficient enough process that I can actually 
recommend that you do it yourself, especially at the graduate level 
where your time is not so free as it once may have been.  The one 
thing I know for certain is that there are several doctoral degrees 
waiting for those working to solve various aspects of this problem.

Joseph

-- 
How many children in America are not taught how to read?
If they are blind, the answer is 90%.
Find out how you can help: http://www.braille.org/


On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 11:51:40PM -0400, Elizabeth wrote:
>
>Hello List,
> 
>I have been working with my disabilities office to receive my textbooks in an alternative format, however this has proven to be a rather frustrating and unreliable process for obtaining my textbooks. Does anyone know of a way that I could somehow bypass the disabilities office to obtain my textbooks in an electronic format? I’ve already tried looking for them on bookshare, but I did not have any luck in finding them there. I know that RFBD is a great resource, but I’ve noticed that they don’t typically spell out words that might be important when taking tests or exams. Since I’ve never been really good at spelling, I would prefer to have access to an electronic file rather than recorded audio. Does anyone know how I could go about obtaining digital versions of my textbooks without going through my disabilities office?
> 
> 
>Thanks,
>Elizabeth