Donations link sorted...

[drew]

I won't bang on about this. Have a read and if you feel so inclined, you'll have my sincere appreciation.

Link

Cheers,

Drew.

[Rxke]

Good on you.

I didn't know it was not widely recognized in the UK.

Here (Belgium) the school system seems to be the very opposite. My sister is a teacher and gets a lot of heads-up about it even before she sees her students.

(Warning: rant-y stuff ahead:)

As I digitize rare books, manuscripts et c. in a uni library for a living, I happen to sometimes work with an organisation that also does some of the stuff your org does, (also formatting books for blind readers to use in text-to-speech readers et c. ) They're also pretty cash strapped.

And here, the ugly money-grabbing copyright monster raises its head, in a disgusting way:

When they ask for electronic versions of a book to use it in voice-readers et c. , publishers very often flatly refuse it because they're scared "it end up illegally on the internets"

So they say: 'buy a hardcopy, cut off the spine, put it through an automated scanner and OCR it (which is never even 99% correct.)

Some people are just greedy bastards.

Often, the organisation can't even afford to buy the books to do that, so the students with visual impairments are left out in the rain because some money-grabbing bastard is afraid of haxx0rzz

[Cmdr Wyvern]

Damn the money grabbing bastards of the copyright trolling cartels straight to Hell.
It's not the "haxxorz"or "piratez" that'll do them in, it's the pissing on their own customers and treating said customers as thieves.
Heh, all the while releasing second-rate product that really isn't worth stealing, nevermind paying stupidly high prices for.

</endrant>

[drew]

My son has Dyslexia and the Kindle has been a massive boon to him due to the 'text-to-speech' functionality.

Apart from certain books who have DRM protection and deliberately prevent the text-to-speech from working....

Cheers,

Drew.

[Rxke]

Apart from certain books who have DRM protection and deliberately prevent the text-to-speech from working....
.

unbelievable isn't it?

Some publishers demanded this because they are actually afraid the 'talking books' market would be undermined, sigh.

[Disembodied]

Here's something from a trade newsletter I get:

The Federation of European Publishers have raised concerns over library.nu and its activities. An anti-piracy law firm in Germany has researched the titles available through this site. Over 50,000 books can be illegally downloaded. Most of them are in English and German.

Börsenverein, the trade association for German publishers, are now considering taking action against the platform with the support of publishers. As many UK and other publishers are also affected, they would be interested to hear whether any other publishers are interested in joining the effort.

Piracy is seen as "a problem" by a lot of publishers – and to be honest I can't think of any industry that would be totally cool with people enjoying its for-sale products for free. But I don't think many people are making lots of money from pirating ebooks, and (speaking as someone entering my 20th year in the book trade) I don't think it's actually a problem for publishers. Historically, only about a quarter of the readers of a book ever put money into an author's pocket: physical books are lent, and sold second-hand, and re-lent, and re-sold ... I own a lot of second-hand books and none of the money I've spent on them has gone to the author or the publisher. And authors and publishers are, if not fine with that (I know several who would love to be able to ban it, if they ruled the world), then at least accepting of that.

This kind of "anti-piracy" is a kneejerk, I think. A stupid, and unfortunate, kneejerk, and it should be a good diagnostic method of telling the smart publishers (who won't care) from the dumb ones (who'll start demanding all kinds of sanctions and law changes that will affect their customers but won't affect the file-sharers – who in many cases actually buy more of the real things anyway).