World Trends on DAISY Development

George Kerscher

President of IDPF, Secretary General of the DAISY Consortium

Good afternoon. It's wonderful being here. I'm delighted to talk about the Daisy technology and E-PUB because we can make a huge difference in the lives of students with disabilities, from the very earliest grades all the way through higher education. And strategically this group is looking at making some decisions in this country, and what I'd like to do is provide some insights on what is happening in the United States, both legally and technically, that could influence your decisions. I divide the publishing arena in the United States into two categories regarding education. One is what we call K through 12, kindergarten through 12th grade, which is the primary school, junior high and high school. Then there is the higher education market. The big difference between K12 and higher education is who buys the books, whose spending the money. In kindergarten through 12th grade, it's the state, it's the local school that purchases the books that are used in the classroom. In higher education it's the students who purchase the books, and the professors assign whatever they like, but it's the students who have to pay for it. What has evolved is a used book market where the students buy the print book at very high prices, and then after the course is over, they sell the book to another student or back to the bookstore. That same book may be sold many, many different times to various students. The publisher makes a profit on the first sale and never sees a profit again as long as that book transfers hands. So what is evolving in the United States is a theory that digital publishing can raise more profits for publishers than print publishing.

The book would be sold once to each student for a lower price, but only once. The student would not be able to transfer it to another student. The publishers save money in printing costs, and in storage and warehousing, transferring the books. All of these things are ways of saving money for the publishing industry and making more profits. So what happened in higher education over the past year was that universities started to pilot test digital publishing in their schools. The Amazon Kindle, the Sony E-Reader, and other devices were used in different colleges. For example, Arizona State University, which is the largest university in the United States, about 70,000 students, piloted the use of the Amazon Kindle. A group called the Reading Rights Coalition was formed earlier about the Kindle and how text-to-speech was turned off. But the Reading Rights Coalition looked at the pilot and said, Arizona State University is not paying any attention to people with disabilities when they're doing this test. So the American Council of the Blind and the National Federation of the Blind filed a lawsuit against Arizona State University for the use of inaccessible technology. The university said they would provide accessible books to their blind and print disabled students in the same old way they did with print books. They would scan it, do something to make it accessible, but not provide the same book, at the same time, and at the same price to the student with the disability. So the conclusion that was reached by the Department of Justice was that digital books are different; they are not like print, and because they can be accessible right out of the box, that they must be accessible or they cannot be used in higher education. Three other colleges agreed to the same rules, that any future pilot or use of digital books must be with devices that are accessible. Now this is having a profound impact in the United States because we know that digital publishing in higher education must be accessible. This fits with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities that President Obama signed, and which is in the process of being ratified in the United States. So our information technology must be fundamentally accessible.

When we see in K12, I'm shifting over now to K12, when we start to see digital versions of books introduced in schools, they too will need to be accessible. Several years ago, a law was passed\we have in the United States a copyright exception that allows organizations that are nonprofit to make books for people with disabilities without seeking the permission of the publisher. But that is an independent activity, and more and more, in order to make the books, we like to use the files from the publisher. Good source files that can be used to create Daisy and other types of content\so what happened was a law was passed that requires publishers to provide files to a national archive of all the textbooks that are being used in the United States. Currently there are about 20,000 titles in this national archive. They looked around at the formats that should be used, and through a lot research and work that the Office of Special Education did, they identified what they call the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard. It's called NIMAS, and they said we're going to identify a format that publishers must use to provide the structure and content of the books. And they chose the Daisy XML as the NIMAS standard. All publishers are now required to put their books in XML using the Daisy standard and provide it to the archive. I want to explain that the Daisy XML is only the structure and the content. It's not a completed Daisy book that you can put into one of these players. In order to have a completed Daisy book you would need to add things like a navigation center, synchronization files, probably audio files. So the goal of the national archive was only to get the XML files, the raw materials, the raw data that is needed in order to produce any kind of accessible or commercial publication.

That Daisy XML standard was also adopted by the International Digital Publishing Forum that controls the standard called E-PUB. The Daisy XML was included in the E-PUB standard, along with XHGML. Also at this time, the Daisy navigation model, which has proven to be so popular throughout the world, was also included in the E-PUB specification. So what we have now is, I'll stay with K12, is that these files are available to organizations like Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic and to Bookshare.org in order to make a finished Daisy product, and both those organizations take those XML files and make a book that you can put into one of the Daisy players. Other organizations will take those same files and make Braille or large print, because from the XML you can produce pretty much anything you want. The United States has made some big mistakes you should avoid here. One of the mistakes is that they also ask each school and state to take those files and use them themselves to make the materials. And this has been proven to be real big problem because the teachers in the schools don't know how to use XML. They really want a finished book that they can get and use with their students. So one of the mistakes is this theory that teachers would be able to create books for students by themselves, and that is not working. It should be organizations that are technically setup to process XML, and create the content and deliver to the schools. More of a centralized production process than this decentralized, each school doing their own thing. So that continues to evolve.

Moving onto the E-PUB spec and Daisy revision. Because the E-PUB uses Daisy XML, there is a close relationship and a very growing relationship between Daisy and E-PUB. Right now, the Daisy Consortium is in the middle of the revision to the Daisy standard, and it's moving into Daisy 4. We see this revision taking two steps. One part, I'll call them parts, is what we call authoring and interchange, and that's equal to the Daisy XML that is used for archiving. It's going to get improved in the revision, but essentially it's authorizing and interchange for archival purposes and intended for further processing. The other part of the standard is distribution, where we want to distribute a product to a person. This may end up being an audio book, it may end up being multimedia audio and text synchronized, or it may be just text. And if it is just text, the E-PUB specification is more appropriate than what we have in the old Daisy XML now. We are looking forward to harmonization of the E-PUB specification with Daisy. So when you produce a book, when you distribute it, you would pick your different distribution formats. It may be E-PUB, it may be multimedia, it may be audio, but you pick your distribution format for your target market. We see this moving into the E-PUB specification where the E-PUB reading systems, the Sony Readers, the Kindles, the Nook from Barnes & Noble, and there are many, many of them right know, will be doing E-PUB. We see the Daisy players playing Daisy content and playing E-PUB right now. Some of the reading systems are doing this today, and I would expect that more and more of Daisy reading systems would be able to read all of the formats. The basic, most important thing that I can say for students in K12, elementary, junior high and high school, is they need a very rich reading experience. The Daisy distributed files provide that very rich reading experience. As students get older and move into higher education, they are going to be encountering more and more E-PUB documents, and those should be fully accessible. They may not provide human narration, they may not provide the best text-to-speech that you would get in a prepared document using the Daisy Pipeline, but they should be fundamentally accessible, moving forward, and allow students everywhere to get an education, from the very early years through their last days in college. Thank you very much.