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