[NABS-L] Proof of Purchase

[Elizabeth Mohnke]

Hello Chris,

Yes, it is standard practice to provide a proof of purchase if you receive your textbooks from the disabilities office. The role of the disabilities office is to provide you with accessible textbooks and not free textbooks.

However, if there is a print copy of the textbook in the library or any other place on campus, you could ask the disabilities office to provide you with an accessible copy of the textbook to be checked out and used in the same manner as any other student on campus.

Some campus bookstores provide a brief period at the beginning of the semester to return textbooks for a full refund. So if you do not want to keep your print textbooks, you could return them to the campus bookstore after providing the disabilities office with the proof of purchase.

If we as blind students wish to compete on terms of equality with our sighted classmates, we must be willing to follow the same rules as our sighted classmates. This means purchasing our textbooks in the same manner as our sighted classmates.

Warm regards,
Elizabeth

-----Original Message-----
From: NABS-L [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Chris Nusbaum via NABS-L
Sent: Monday, January 15, 2018 5:28 PM
To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
Cc: Chris Nusbaum <cnusbaumnfb at gmail.com>
Subject: [NABS-L] Proof of Purchase

Hello All:

I hope this email finds each of you enjoying a smooth start to your spring semester! It seems that, on this first day of classes for me, I find myself stumped on an accessibility question which I'm hoping you can help with. I received an email this morning from my DSS coordinator asking me to provide her with a "proof of purchase" for each of my textbooks. She says that students who receive alternative accessible copies of books are still required to buy the books from the campus bookstore in order to avoid copyright infringement on the part of the DSS office. As far as I understand, if DSS obtains a book from an accessible online resource such as AccessText, Bookshare, or Learning Ally, the Chaffee Amendment would protect them from copyright problems. Furthermore, if they get the accessible book directly from the book's publisher, the publisher is granting them access to the text, which should also protect the college from copyright problems. But my DSS coordinator is telling me I still need to buy my books from the Campus Store anyway.

So, can anyone explain how this works? Do I really need to buy the print books if I already got them from DSS in an accessible format? If I do need to buy them, what do I do with the print books once I get them? It seems like it would be a waste to buy a perfectly good book only for it to sit on my desk as I read the accessible copy which DSS got somewhere else. I want to do all that I need to in order to get access to my textbooks, but I also don't want to spend money unnecessarily. Thank you in advance for helping me make sense of this.

Chris Nusbaum

Sent from my iPhone


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