I love books By DAN BURKE

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I love books; loved them since "Hop on Pop" came in the mail when I was 6.

It's still on my shelves with hundreds more, and not one of them can I read because I am blind.

At least, I can't read them like I used to read them.

I haven't given up reading as I became blind. I read dozens of books last year alone. I listened to recorded textbooks in college, to specialized cassette books from the Library of Congress's National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped for years, and now in recorded digital format. I learned to read and write Braille, and read many books that way.

Over the past 15 years, though, I've read more and more books in digital text formats. I don't buy these electronic books, I make them. I scan a book and convert it to text on my computer. Then I read it one of two ways: I listen to a synthesized text-to-speech reader read it to me, or I read it on a refreshable Braille display.

What I can't do is what every sighted person can do: go to the bookstore or library and get the latest book I want and read it on the spot. The methods I use are time-consuming. And the producers of alternate formats, such as NLS, take months, even years, to get their small number of titles into circulation.

Amazon's release of its Kindle 2 book reader changes this or nearly does.
The Kindle has TTS reading built in, so Kindle editions can be read out loud. It's the first commercial e-book that is out-of-the-box accessible.
Kindle titles now number 260,000, outstripping all U.S. sources of alternate formats for the print disabled combined, so excitement about equality in access is understandable.

But there are barriers. Surprisingly, the biggest threat to this equality in access to literature and periodicals is the Authors Guild.
They have decided n not that they might sell more of their works to the millions of Americans with print disabilities who have tended not to buy and read them n but that the TTS rendition is a "derivative work" much like an audio book recorded by themselves or an actor. As such, it is copyright infringement to allow the Kindle to read their works aloud.
They've pressured Amazon to give authors and publishers the right to block access by TTS in the Kindle.

Coincidentally, I just read "Catch-22" for a book club, so this claim fits into the circular logic of Joseph Heller's novel: If a machine reads it to me, then it's not the same book and it's cheating. If the machine doesn't read it, then it's not cheating, and I can't read it.
Or, as stated late in the novel, "Catch-22" means "they" can do whatever you can't stop them from doing.

In response, 31 disability groups formed the Reading Rights Coalition to challenge the Authors Guild claim. Coalition members, who held an informational protest outside the Authors Guild's New York offices on April 7, "believe access to the written word is the cornerstone of education and democracy; and that new technologies must SERVE individuals with disabilities, NOT impede them."

I still love books. Likewise, I love what access to whatever I seek on a given day can mean to me as a responsible member of a democratic society.
For me and for many others with print disabilities, what constitutes a "book" no longer means the bound paper and ink, but the words and ideas contained within them, in a form that we can gain access to, and read by the means necessary to us. The greatest impediment to this access to books is, at present, those who produce them. The question then is not one of rights as to the means, but of access at the same time as everyone else in America.

At last, we live in a time when this is possible.

Go to www.readingrights.org and sign the online petition in support of access via TTS with the Kindle.

Dan Burke of Missoula is president of the Montana Association for the Blind and a member of the Board of Directors of the National Federation of the Blind.

Reprinted from http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2009/05/05/opinion/guest/guest10.txt.