What I did on my summer holidays.

[Janina Sajka]

I think Kirk got it about right below. Especially the part about "summer," 
because it was certainly unseasonally warm in Toronto last week! <grin>

One note about the 15/16 ips, four-track cassettes as specialized media. 
This format was defined explicitly as a specialized format for blind users 
of specially produced content. One can think of this format as a kind of 
analog tape intellectual property protection scheme. We can hope and dream 
of a day when we don't need such things, but we need them now if we're 
going to have access to large quantities of published books in a 
format/medium that really works for us. 

I should note that many countries are jealous of the U.S.' Chafee 
Amendement. In most other countries (though not all), organizations 
producing braille or audio (and soon the DAISY format) need to get 
permission in writing from copyright holders before they can begin to 
produce a title. This takes a lot of time, and, of course, producing 
titles takes a lot of time to. One side benefit of the Chafee Amendment 
means that titles can be made available much more quickly than before.

The goal, of course, is to get as many titles produced in the DAISY format 
as quickly as possible, and to get them into users' hands as quickly as 
possible. Another goal is to give users a wide range of choices in the 
technology they use to "read" this content. There are already some 
hardware devices that 'play" DAISY titles--and there will be more. There 
are also software players already--and there will be many more of these, 
on all the OS used by us.

So, I am very glad that Kirk was with us last week. The Digital Talking 
Book technology is going to be very important to our community, and we 
need the widest range of experience and viewpoint in getting the basics 
right so that anyone and everyone who qualifies can participate.

PS: If you live in the U.K., you will have the option of titles in DAISY 
late this spring. Here in the States, we'll have to wait a bit longer.


-- 
	
				Janina Sajka, Director
				Technology Research and Development
				Governmental Relations Group
				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

Email: janina at afb.net		Phone: (202) 408-8175

Chair, Accessibility SIG
Open Electronic Book Forum (OEBF)
http://www.openebook.org