PREMIUM SEARCH Search by job title, geography and build a list of executive contacts
I'm a voracious reader. My home library is stocked with the works of Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Helen Keller, Charles Dickens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others. These great writers intertwined experience with the emotional power of descriptive language to produce eternal masterpieces.
But blind, visually impaired, learning-disabled, and other challenged readers have other ways to enjoy reading. About 15 years ago, audiobooks were introduced to the retail bookstore market. Today, the audio-book industry is a $2 billion-a-year market. The 1999 Audio Publishers Assn. Consumer Awareness Study (audiopub.com) found that the market for spoken-word audio recordings grew approximately 360% from 1990 to 1998. In 1995, about 12% of American households were listening to audiobooks. By 1999, that number had nearly doubled, to 21%. The Book Industry Study Group reports that during the period 1993-97, the rate of audiobook sales growth was five times that of the consumer printed-book sector.
But books on audiocassette may soon go the way of the 78-rpm record. A dynamic new technology for spoken-word recordings, called digital talking books (DTBs), promises to rapidly replace tapes. The technology is about three years old and not commonly available in bookstores yet. But DTBs offer the flexibility of a print book harnessed to the power of a computer. You can download them from the Web. And best of all, whole libraries can now be fit on a few disks.
FOLLOW THE READER. I have a DTB on the history of the Americans with Disabilities Act written by Jonathan M. Young, the associate director for disability outreach in the White House Office of Public Liaison. To listen, I simply put the disk into the CD slot on my computer and followed the installation instructions. Now, whenever I want to start listening again, I just put the disk in and hit play on my PC's CD player.
The Library of Congress -- a leader in the field of audiobooks -- has installed a custom digital-recording studio and expects to produce its first DTBs later this year. The plan: to replace the hundreds of thousands of audiocassettes used by the library's visually impaired clients. The National Library Service, which spends $140 million a year recording books on cassette, has more than 500,000 audiocassette players formatted for six-hour audiotapes, but DTBs promise to make that technology obsolete.
The Library of Congress' shift of interest is a big bet on digital technology. These systems offer a number of potential advantages over analog designs. For one, the sound quality is better. For another, it's easier to navigate a book using a PC. You can jump from the table of contents to a chapter, skip through text one paragraph at a time, skip over footnotes, and even insert digital bookmarks where you leave off. DTBs also can provide the full text of the book in electronic form along with the recorded version, so that a person with, say, a learning disability, can follow along with the reader's voice.
CUSTOMIZED LEARNING. True, you need a pricey computer to listen to DTBs. But the disks themselves already cost less than audiocassettes of books (the only hitch is you have to specially order them, whereas you can readily purchase books on tape in the store). The Library of Congress estimates that it will take 5 to 10 more years before audiocassettes disappear. But eventually, the National Library Service believes consumer interest will create a market for lower-cost DTB systems.
DTBs are designed to accommodate people who cannot read regular print material. For visually impaired and learning-disabled readers, the computer allows them to select text and page colors, point sizes, and font styles to enhance their visual comprehension.
The technology has clear educational benefits. Teachers can customize the classroom learning experience to students' learning styles (audio or visual) and abilities. This individualized approach strikes me as being ideal for accommodating students with disabilities -- actually for all students.
SOUND OF THE FUTURE. Presidential politics has had a hand in promoting this technology. On July 25, Vice-President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, held a reception celebrating the 10th anniversary of the ADA. That's where I got my copy of Jonathan M. Young's DTB, Equality of Opportunity: The Making of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Vice-President gave a copy to each of his guests with a note stating, "Technology is a major force in enabling all people, including people with disabilities, to enhance educational, employment, and social opportunities. We are pleased that this Digital Talking Book exemplifies the kinds of technologies that are helping to revolutionize our way of life."
Can this technology revolutionize audiobooks? I recently visited a Talking Book World bookstore in Sterling, Va., where the manager told me, "If we sold digital talking books now, we would easily quadruple our stock [of available titles]." On price and volume, a Borders Books spokesman says, "digital talking books are probably the future replacement for audiobooks. You could publish multiple volumes on one disk." One disk can contain 20 to 40 hours of high-quality recorded speech, compared to the six-hour maximum on cassettes.
Sally Carson of Sterling buys audiobooks many times a year for her blind father. Standing outside the Talking Book World store, she told me: "When a tape breaks, you can't replace [only] one. You have to buy a brand new set. Digital books last longer."
Japan and Europe are ahead of the U.S. in the DTB field, especially in education. That's going to be changing soon, I predict. U.S. bookstores will embrace this technology. And the universal-access initiatives built into federal law will expand market opportunities -- not just for disabled people, but for a whole audience that wants to listen to great books.
Join the discussion at BW Online's Assistive Tech Forum. Or drop John a line at JMMAW@aol.com Edited by Douglas Harbrecht
Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
Printer-Friendly Version
