Hi, Janina! DO they plan to rerecord already-existing books from the very scratch or they will use existing tapes for new recordings augmented by indexing etc. Vic ----- Original Message ----- From: "Janina Sajka" <janina@xxxxxxx> To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca> Sent: Monday, January 28, 2002 3:29 AM Subject: Re: What I did on my summer holidays. > 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 > > > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup > >
