Tools of Change: Keynote – Making the book truly accessible, by Jim Fruchterman

Jim Fruchterman of Benetech and BookShare

Taking care of people with disabilities. Need to make the book truly accessible. Founded Bookshare, largest online library for poeple with print disabilities. Users download over 1 million books a year, but not doing nearly enough to get to disabled readers. Blind, low vision, quadriplegic, etc. People who just can’t use books. They give away books under a copyright exemption. Would like it if publishers would become the primary source instead of him. Untapped market. Have to turn down a lot of people who have disabilities but don’t neatly fit into the copyright exemption. These people can’t read current books and he can’t help them. Is a significant market for publishers. They are collateral damage in the fight against piracy. DRM is a blunt instrument that prevents someone from copying, but also prevent a book’s conversion into Braille. I doesn’t have to be that way. Dueling moral high grounds. Publishers are now giving them rights to use the books outside of the US because copyright exemption doesn’t apply to use outside the US. Next version of Epub will the same as the next version of DAISY. Just as solving text accessibility problem, book are becoming more multi-media and the graphics have to be made accessible as well. Accessibility for books is being re-invented with the advances of technology. Have a new iPad app. Features were voted on by consumers. Main message is that the advocacy community wants to move from a charity model and wants to buy publishers products. When first started BookShare the textbook publishers were the most nervous about it. The type of electronic book they publish is not pirated because it doesn’t that the same high quality, image based text in the original. It isn’t needed. They use social DRM and find it works well and have had success with it.