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Large Print Unwelcome on the Kindle
March 5, 2009 | 9:23 pm
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By Joshua Tallent of eBookArchitects.com
It has been my distinct pleasure over the last year to work with the Virginia Woolf Foundation, a non-profit organization that provides reading materials in extra large print to the visually impaired. Michael Gold, the Foundation’s executive director, contacted me early last year and we started researching ways to make large print books available on the Kindle. The largest default font size on the Kindle screen is equivalent to a 16-point font in print, but most large print books are published in at least 18-point, if not more. After some trial and error, I was able to get the Kindle to display text in a 20-point font, larger than the largest regular font size, and a significant improvement for the visually impaired.
Since that discovery I have formatted more than 70 books for the Foundation, from recipe books to science fiction. A few of these works are still under copyright, but the Foundation, as a non-profit organization with the specific goal of providing reading resources to the visually impaired, has the right to distribute these titles under U.S. Copyright law (chapter 1 section 121) and even works with publishers when complaints are made.
Despite this exemption, Amazon recently disabled the foundation’s Digital Text Platform (DTP) account and removed their books, all of them, from the Amazon store. The form letter the foundation was sent seems to be the result of an overly-zealous low level employee, not executive management, but the foundation’s repeated attempts to contact someone with authority at Amazon have been unfruitful, mostly due to the completely closed nature of the company.
I am writing about this on Teleread because I think the eBook community needs to know what is happening. eBooks are a perfect medium for distributing reading material to the visually impaired, and the new text-to-speech capabilities of the Kindle 2 are an added benefit to distributing them in the Kindle format. The books sold by the Virginia Woolf Foundation all display at a higher font size than Amazon allows normal books to display in, so the foundation is providing a needed service that Amazon is not.
I encourage you, if you have contacts at Amazon, please contact them and ask that they push the higher-ups to reinstate the foundation’s account and allow them to continue providing these needed resources to the community.
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Comments:
Well, not to attack the Foundation’s position, as it sounds like they are performing a good service, but large print is not protected by the copyright exemption cited here (as well as in my post a few days ago). They really should be obtaining permission for the titles they convert, which would also give them stronger footing with Amazon.
I disagree. The copyright exemption covers “braille, audio, or digital text which is exclusively for use by blind or other persons with disabilities.” That includes large print, even if only in this context, because the large print books on the Kindle are exceeding the normal parameters for text on the screen. The books are clearly declared as being for the visually impaired, and are honestly hard to read if you are not.
The foundation has tried to get explicit permission before publishing content in the past, but they have found that most publishers won’t even give them the time of day. But when they go ahead, they have had few complaints about their work. I guess that falls under the old adage: it’s easier to get forgiveness than to seek permission.
Amazon seems to be like Google. It is impossible to get a liver person to speak to at Google. Just no way in.
I would suggest the Foundation try their Senator or Congressperson. They may have a way in. Or contact Amazon PR.
> The copyright exemption covers “braille, audio,
> or digital text which is exclusively for use by
> blind or other persons with disabilities.”
The key word here is exclusively. He’s taking money for an edition of a book that I could download to my Kindle and read. I wouldn’t enjoy it as much, but if it was the only Kindle edition of something I wanted to read, yeah, I’d read it.
Vicki
Ebooks are a great option for people with less than perfect vision because it’s so simple to enlarge the text to a comfortable size. This shouldn’t require special large font ebooks, it should be built into the readers. I’m surprised to hear that any readers are limiting this possibility. I have a Cybook and the text size options are excellent, there are 12 font size options, from very small to very large. That’s one thing they’ve done well.
Your experience doesn’t surprise me. I live in Seattle and have been trying for years to build contacts with Amazon without success.
I have passed a link to this article along to several people in the Seattle media who have contacts at Amazon, including someone who used to work there. I hope something comes of that. What you’re doing deserves assistance.
Also, feel free to visit the link attached to my name. If Inkling Books has any titles your readers might like, I’ll be happy to supply the files you need. If they like adventure, Across Asia on a Bicycle is a good choice. It’s about the Asian leg of the second bike trip around the world and the first to take the difficult route through Central Asia. It’s a fascinating tale. And if Amazon gives you any hassle, I’ll be happy to provide you with written permission to reprint it in large type, as print or an ebook.
There’s a technical matter that I do not understand and would appreciate your help in resolving. I must have at least 14 pt black type in my reading material. Right, I can’t really see what I’m typing now! Why isn’t it possible to change the type face on a downloaded book in Kindle? If we can change WHOutlook express, Word docs and everything else, why is it impossible, illegal, etc. to increase the size of text on the Kindle player? I — and millions of readers — really need large print as well as the lightweight feature of Kindle because of other disabilities. Isn’t there any way we can do this? Thanks a lot for your help, people.
I just got my large print edition of my book Things change uploaded with no problems.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002R0FRUY
There is a large print font hack that works on the K2 for any book:
https://sites.google.com/a/etccreations.com/kdesignworks/Home/font-install-files
The sample pics look pretty big to me.
(The default font max size on Kindle looks to be about 14 points non-bold.)
As for other readers, the Cybooks do a good job of displaying a fairly large font size and the Hanlin V3′s (BeBook, Aztak EZReader, etc) when running OpenInkpot do a fabulous job at large print rendering; any font, any spacing, any margins, any point size up to well past 40-points, plus there is a full-screen bold option. The default ADE-based firmware has no shortage of bugs and design misteps but lack of large font display isn’t one of them; it offers at least two very large font sizes in both portrait and landscape orientation.
Options exist as long as you’re not dealing with PDFs and locked-down epubs.