Digitized Books for the Disabled

For some people with MS, book reading becomes difficult, and sometimes it’s not the eyes that are to blame, but rather the inability to turn a page.

 

Brewster Kahle, a digital librarian and founder of a virtual library called the Internet Archive, has launched a worldwide campaign to double the number of books available for print-disabled people, according to an article in USA Today.

 

The Internet Archive began scanning books in 2004 and now has more than one million available in DAISY format, or Digital Accessible Information System, a means of creating “talking” books that can be downloaded to a handheld device. Unlike books on tape, the digital format makes it easier for print-disabled people to navigate books because they can speed up, slow down and skip around from chapter to chapter.

 

About 7 million books are downloaded by Internet Archive users around the world each month, Kahle says. With 20 scanning centers in the USA and eight in countries around the world, the archive scans more than 1,000 books a day from more than 150 libraries, including the Library of Congress— the largest library in the world that also offers online digitalized collections of books, articles and newspapers.

 

“The Internet Archive encourages people to download all the public-domain books they want — free — and we are not looking to charge libraries for access to the books we have digitized from their collections,” Kahle told USA Today.

 

For more information go to www.archive.org/index.php. 

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