Re: Digital Talking Book Standard

[Janina Sajka <janina@afb.net>]

Martin, your message is apt and to the point. And, your instinct for a 
FREE software digital talking book player is also on the mark. Now is a 
very, very good time for such a player to come into existence. As someone 
who continues to be very involved in the development of the NISO/DAISY dtb 
standard, I'd like to pose a challenge to the programmers among us:

Please give us a dtb player or two which supports the new NISO/DAISY 
standards--mostly. I say"mostly" because it is not the end of the world if 
you can't immediately support MPEG. Please know that the NISO/DAISY 
standards people are keenly aware of the problems posed by specifying 
MPEG. Regretably, ogg-vorbis was not judged ready for prime time yet--so 
if someone wants to work on that, that would also be helpful, because we 
truly need a GPL compression package that provides quality files that will 
compete well with MPEG.

Let me say why we need a GPL dtb player right now. I am seriously 
concerned that agencies will impose some kind of encryption technologies 
which they will not want to describe to GPL programmers. That would be 
most unfortunate. Far better, imho, for this community to show that a GPL 
player can really do the job of accessing (both text and audio) dtbs well. 
Far better to show that public/private key encryption may just be adequate 
enough.

The pendulum has swung away from tight controls, at least among the 
libraries that serve our communities today. Frankly, the earlier version 
of the NISO standard was a bit stricter about copyright enforcement--what 
the publishers like to call "Digital Rights Management." I think even our 
earlier, stricter model was still smarter than what we've been seeing from 
commercial ebook publishers. The commercial publishers are putting the 
onus on the user and are killing industry prospects by doing so. The 
earlier recommendations are still online at:

	http://www.loc.gov/nls/niso/drm.htm

In summary, this earlier document expects that some, but certainly not 
all, titles produced as digital talking books will need to be restricted 
to qualified recipients in order to maintain long standing programs of 
free access to books--as with NLS here in the U.S. This would also apply 
to U.S. agencies such as RFB&D. It would, in fact, be the copyright 
management scheme which would distinguish titles produced in the NISO 
standard as qualified titles under the so-called "Chafee Amendement" to 
U.S. Copyright law. Chafee is a good thing, and we should not lose it.

The DMCA is another matter entirely. The NISO thinking was to put the 
emphasis on catching willful violaters, not on needlessly encumbering 
honest users. My expectation is that public/private key can do this very 
well--and can do it in a platform independ matter.

Of course there's a chicken and egg aspect to all of this. Who would build 
a player when there's nothing to play? How would one even test it? Yet, I 
would think that this community would not want to leave the definitions of 
what's possible to agencies who are far more steeped in proprietary 
software than is probably good for the community at large. So, let me 
simply offer this: I will find some NISO/DAISY content for you to test a 
player with if you are building a GPL player and need something to work 
with. Just write me privately.

Lastly, let me say just a little more about how much content is actually 
out there. There is virtually none in the newest version of the standard 
simply because it's still not 100% nailed down. The NISO folks have until 
December 17 to vote on the specifications that were submitted to them just 
a few weeks ago. You should know that we truly do not expect any problems 
with this voting, and we do expect a lovely Christmas pressent shortly 
after December 17.

There is a fair amount of content available to earlier incarnations of the 
digital talking book specifications as produced by DAISY. In particular, 
it may be important for players to support the new NISO/DAISY 
specifications at:

	http://www.loc.gov/nls/niso

as well as the older, DAISY 2.0 specifications which can be found at:

	http://www.daisy.org

In particular, RFB&D has been quietly testing textbooks in several K-12 
schools for blind children around the U.S. They are hoping to begin 
offering about 3,000 titles encoded in DAISY 2.0 to all their clients 
sometime during 2002. Also, the talking book programs at CNIB and RNIB 
(U.K.) are expecting to launch programs for their clients in the spring of 
2002 with approximately2,500 titles in each. So, as you can see, content 
does already exist in the older DAISY 2.0 specification, though it is not 
yet generally available.

Last point on the encryption issues. We expect that whatever copyright 
based encryption/decryption is involved needs to be nationally based. In 
other words, the laws that authorize free programs for blind (and 
otherwise print disabled) people differ country to country. So, any 
support for a particular solution needs to be modular in order to handle 
such national differences.

I want to end on a more cheerful point. Even mainstream publishers are 
beginning to realize that encumbering users is a bad way to promote the 
value of electronic publishing. Please take a look at this website:

	http://www.openanebook.org

It is intended to be a place for publishers of all kinds to offer their
free content and their free tools. So, if you know of any, please offer
them up there. And, if you have influence with any blindness agency or
ebook publishers, please get them to join DAISY and/or OEBF. We need
broader participation in both places in order to realize a vision of
epublishing which creates accessible titles that are comfortable and fun
to use while still paying authors and editors for the value they add.


 On 
Mon, 19 Nov 2001, Martin G. McCormick wrote:

> 	I certainly hope that players for DTB's will be available
> for Linux when the technology actually begins to bear fruit.
> 
> 	This truly is a wonderful next step in the Talking Book
> program. Just think of the logistical problems of moving and
> caring for physical materials that this solves.  There will still
> need to be traditional Talking Books for many years to come, but
> I think this is the future and it may get to a point where there
> won't need to be as many physical recordings produced as there
> are now.
> 
> 	The one thing I see as holding things up is the one
> artificial technical issue and that is DRM or Digital Rights
> Management.
> 
> 	How is that going to be accomplished?  The standards
> document simply says that digital rights management will be
> supported but probably wisely does not prescribe exactly what
> sort of mechanism will be used.
> 
> 	Hopefully, being eligible to receive traditional Talking
> Books and Braille materials will enable one to also receive any
> DTB's they are entitled to receive.
> 
> 	In the main-stream consumer world, digital rights
> management has not been doing too well.  Some systems are hacked
> almost before they are released.  Other systems tend to do the
> opposite and malfunction in ways their developers never thought
> of to cause honest users of the technology to be denied service.
> 
> 	Some rights management systems have even gained the
> distinction of suffering from both maladies.  The crackers
> de fang the protection and the honest users discover that the
> software thinks they are thieves because of something their
> equipment or they accidentally did.
> 
> 	This issue, not technology, has held up everything from
> digital audio tape a decade or so ago to present-day high-definition
> television systems.
> 
> 	Linux and FreeBSD should actually be good test beds for
> this technology because it is based on open-source models and any
> hanky panky mechanisms such as back doors or scripting
> applications are a little easier to police than they are in
> proprietary operating systems.
> 
> Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
> OSU Center for Computing and Information Services Network Operations Group
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
	
				Janina Sajka, Director
				Technology Research and Development
				Governmental Relations Group
				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

Email: janina@afb.net		Phone: (202) 408-8175

Chair, Accessibility SIG
Open Electronic Book Forum (OEBF)
http://www.openebook.org

Will electronic books surpass print books? Read our white paper,
Surpassing Gutenberg, at http://www.afb.org/ebook.asp

Download a free sample Digital Talking Book edition of Martin Luther
King Jr's inspiring "I Have A Dream" speech at
http://www.afb.org/mlkweb.asp

Learn how to make accessible software at
http://www.afb.org/accessapp.asp