TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home
News & views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics
Why Print-Disabled People Should THANK the Authors Guild, Not Picket It
Saturday, April 4th, 2009By Paul Biba
Editor’s Note: The following post from The Center for Accessible Publishing has been reprinted in full with the author’s permission. Paul
When Amazon revealed that the Kindle 2 included text-to-speech, it created a ripple of interest in the disability community. I remember thinking, it’s cool that they added that, not a bad first step. My next thought was, I wonder how they got permission from all those publishers and authors? Turns out, they hadn’t sought permission, they just did it - how Nike of them. By itself, this new feature was hardly headline news, nor was it a breakthrough in assistive technology. After all, the Kindle was clearly not designed to be accessible to the visually-impaired.
But then the Authors Guild cried foul, pointing out that the Kindle was now capable of infringing on audio rights which authors may have sold separately, and suddenly text-to-speech (or TTS, or T2S) was a hot topic. The most vocal critics of the Authors Guild position have been disability-related groups, who quickly formed the Reading Rights Coalition to demonstrate solidarity in opposition to any curtailment of the Kindle’s TTS function, and in general to protest the lack of books and other materials published in formats accessible to people with disabilities that impair their ability to use print to read (thus the term ‘print-disabled’). The Coalition has announced an ‘informational picket’ of the Authors Guild office on April 7, and an additional appearance at the LA Times Book Fair in Los Angeles later in the month.
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