What I did on my summer holidays.

[Victor Tsaran]

Hi, Janina!
DO they plan to rerecord already-existing books from the very scratch or
they will use existing tapes for new recordings augmented by indexing etc.
Vic

----- Original Message -----
From: "Janina Sajka" <janina at afb.net>
To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Monday, January 28, 2002 3:29 AM
Subject: Re: What I did on my summer holidays.


> 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
>
>
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