From a press release from ReadHowYouWant.com:SYDNEY, Australia — In celebration of Louis Braille’s 200th birthday, accessible publishing innovator ReadHowYouWant has opened the doors to its online braille and DAISY bookshop at ReadHowYouWant, who burst on to the publishing scene only one year ago with its variety of large print book formats ranging from 16 to 24 point fonts, partners with publishers to make it easy for them to service the visually impaired, and comply with most disabilities requirements world wide.
Blind readers now have access to thousands of titles in Braille, including bestsellers Stillness Speaks by Eckhart Tolle (New World Library), Being Peace by Thich Nhat Hanh (Parallax Press), and Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain (New World Library). Children and young adults can find popular titles including, How to Take the GRRRR Out of Anger by Marjorie Lisovskis and Elizabeth Verdick (Free Spirit Publishing), Scratch Kitten Goes To Sea by Jessica Green (Little Hare), Extreme Habitats: Desert Survival by Jim Pipe (Weekly Reader), and A Doctor’s Busy Day by Nicole Boyd (Rosen Publishing). A large selection of literary classic titles is also available.
“We produce Braille books that we distribute to a network of libraries around the country, who then send them to over 500,000 end users. But we’re limited on the number of Braille books that we can produce. ReadHowYouWant conversion technology (is) produced in accordance with BANA codes, (so) we’ll be able to offer a lot more titles,” says Judith Dixon, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
In addition to Braille book files, which are priced at $7.99 and $9.99 each, ReadHowYouWant also offers over 2,000 titles from its Classics Library in DAISY format for $9.99 each. DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) is a new e-book and talking book format that synchronizes an audio rendition with the written text. DAISY books play on DAISY players, which are either standalone units or computer applications. DAISY is ideal for vision-impaired and blind readers, dyslexic readers, and for readers who are unable to hold a conventional book or turn pages.
“We’ve developed an XML software program that can mark up a book in to a number of different accessible formats. This allows us to quickly and efficiently create braille and DAISY files and literally produce hundreds of books in the time it has taken others to just do a few titles,” says Christopher Stephen, ReadHowYouWant’s founder, who, as part of the research and development for ReadHowYouWant’s braille conversion technology, taught himself Braille, though he is fully sighted.
