[real-eyes] Fw: Project puts 1M books online for blind
- From: "Reginald George" <sgeorge@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <real-eyes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 7 May 2010 10:08:42 -0500
SAN FRANCISCO - Even as audio versions of best-sellers fill store shelves and
new technology fuels the popularity of digitized books, the number of titles
accessible to people who are blind or dyslexic is minuscule.
A new service being announced Thursday by the nonprofit Internet Archive in San
Francisco is trying to change that. The group has hired hundreds of people
to scan thousands of books into its digital database - more than doubling the
titles available to people who aren't able to read a hard copy.
Brewster Kahle, the organization's founder, says the project will initially
make 1 million books available to the visually impaired, using money from
foundations,
libraries, corporations and the government. He's hoping a subsequent book drive
will add even more titles to the collection.
"We'll offer current novels, educational books, anything. If somebody then
donates a book to the archive, we can digitize it and add it to the collection,"
he said.
The problems with many of the digitized books sold commercially is that they're
expensive, they're often abridged, and they don't come in a format that
is easily accessed by the visually impaired.
The collections are also limited to the most popular titles published within
the past several years.
The Internet Archive is scanning a variety of books in many languages so they
can be read by the software and devices blind people use to convert written
pages into speech. The organization has 20 scanning centers in five countries,
including one in the Library of Congress.
"Publishers mostly concentrate on their newest, profitable books. We are
working to get all books online," Kahle said.
Marc Maurer, president of the National Federation of the Blind, says getting
access to books has been a big challenge for blind people.
"Now, for the first time, we're going to have access to an enormous quantity,"
he said.
Maurer, who is blind, said that when he was in college, he hired people to read
books to him because the Braille and audio libraries were so limited.
"That has been the way most students have gotten through school," he said.
"This kind of initiative by the Internet Archive will change that for many
people."
Only about 5 percent of published books are available in a digital form that's
accessible to the visually impaired, Maurer said, and there are even fewer
books produced in Braille.
Ben Foss, a San Francisco man with dyslexia, says having so many more books
available is liberating. He compares it to a million more ramps being added
throughout a city for a person who uses a wheelchair.
"For me, it's about access. They have provided flexibility and freedom to get
books in a format that I use every day," said Foss, 36, who is the director
of access technology in the digital health group at Intel Corp.
The digitized books scanned by the Internet Archive will be available for free
to visually impaired people through the organization's website. The organization
does not run into copyright concerns because the law allows libraries to make
books available to people with disabilities, Kahle said.
Jessie Lorenz, an associate director at the Independent Living Resource Center
San Francisco who has been blind since birth, said it has been hard to find
controversial or edgy titles in a format she can use, and choices are often
dictated by institutions or service groups who have selected certain books
for scanning.
"For individuals living with print-related disabilities, this is
groundbreaking," she said. "This project will enable people like me to choose
what we read."
Lorenz, 31, has already decided what she wants: Howard Stern's autobiography
"Private Parts," Andrew Weil's "The Natural Mind," and, perhaps most
importantly,
her grandmother's cookbook.
___
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