Report on the LA Times Festival of Books

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Dear Colleagues:

The Reading Rights Coalition team has returned from the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and all who participated feel that our work there was extremely successful.  Let me begin by thanking each one of you who participated in preparing materials, making arrangements, and running our booth at the fair; this work could not have been done without you.  Special thanks is due to the members of the California Council of the Blind for their invaluable assistance during the fair. With that very important bit of business out of the way, let me briefly report on what happened during this massive event.

For two days, members of the Reading Rights Coalition manned a booth to hand out flyers, solicit signatures for our petition, and inform readers, authors, and publishers about the issue of text-to-speech on the Kindle 2.  At different times each day, authors participated in panel discussions, which members of the Coalition attended.  At each of these discussions, when the time came for questions from the audience, we raised the question of whether the authors on stage would support text-to-speech on the Kindle 2 for all readers.  Mary Higgins Clark, bestselling writer of suspense novels, and her daughter Carol Higgins Clark, a successful novelist in her own right who also collaborates on works with her mother, agreed before a packed crowd to make sure that all of their works would be available with text-to-speech.  Although specifically aware of the objections raised by the Authors Guild, these two popular writers nevertheless affirmed that their own works would be available to readers with print disabilities on the Kindle 2.  At a panel called “Writers as Activists,” the crowd erupted into spontaneous applause when another activist from our Coalition raised the Kindle 2 issue and asked the authors whether they would support text-to-speech for their books and equal rights for readers with print disabilities.  We believe that at least one of these activist authors will soon express public support for our position.  Following this panel, several audience members stopped by our booth to sign the petition.  A number of authors also stopped by to add their signatures, including Randy Shaw, who had previously expressed his support in our press release announcing our participation in the Festival of Books.  The publishers we spoke with were either supportive or open to further discussions with the Reading Rights Coalition.  Public support was overwhelmingly in our favor, with hundreds if not thousands of visitors to our booth signing our petition.

There remains much follow-up work to do in the wake of this success, and tentative commitments expressed to us during the event will need to be nailed down.  In addition, we will need to plan carefully for our next moves in this continuing battle.  While we gained a great deal of support, it is clear from some of our discussions that more work needs to be done.  Some authors were reluctant to make a commitment out of deference to their agents or publishers.  A prominent agent expressed to us the misinformed view that allowing text-to-speech on the Kindle 2 would result in piracy of content.  Nonetheless, we feel that a great deal of work was done to educate the public and the book industry about this critically important issue and that the tide is beginning to turn in our favor.

None of this would have happened had we not all come together to support the rights of Americans with print disabilities.  This terrific team laid the groundwork for success at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books and will continue to move forward until the rights of all citizens who cannot read print are protected.

Sincerely:

Chris Danielsen, NFB

Submitted April 28, 2009