The Soundproof Book: Exploration of Rights Conflict and Access to Commercial EBooks for People with Disabilities

"The electronic book should be a boon to people with disabilities. Unfortunately, the nascent eBook industry has often soundproofed its books, preventing access by people with visual and learning disabilities using adaptive technology. Persons using synthetic text-to-speech technology or electronic braille systems are not allowed access to the underlying text of the eBooks, and thus are cut off from the content. The leading eBook technology providers, Adobe and Microsoft, have provided the option to disable disability access in their publishing systems, at the request of publishers. This is not because of an explicit effort to deny access to the disabled community, but rather is due to concerns over audio book rights and enabling piracy of book content. We explore these conflicting visions of accessible eBooks and set forth the essential background for the search for a solution that meets the needs of both publishers and people with disabilities." [First Monday]

Yet another negative consequence of being overly concerned with locking down digital rights. If the industry is that concerned about piracy, they should stop putting out audiobooks on CD and cassette, too. Oh, wait - then there wouldn't be any audiobook industry. Hmmm.

In case you haven't tried this before, you can already find a lot of audiobooks in MP3 format on Kazaa and other P2P networks. For example, you can get Harry Potter and Stephen King titles, among others. That genie is out of the bottle, too. What it should signal to publishers (along with the success of Audible) is that there is a demand for MP3 audiobooks that would supply profits if they would just get over their fears and release their content in that format.

And I don't even need to preach to you folks (the choir) the need to keep digital content and access alive for libraries and people with disabilities, right?