How To Get a Book Recorded by the national Library Service

I am sharing this information for the benefit of two slightly overlapping groups:

• People with print impairments who have specific books they would like to listen to but are not currently available through the libraries for the blind; and


• Authors who would like to see their books included in this service which reaches many thousands of avid bibliophiles.

The overlap is at least me.. probably many, many more blind authors.

It is a rather Byzantine path and no guarantees, but here's the skinny.

An interested NLS reader should contact his/her regional library and provide that library with title, author, and ISBN number. The Regional library will then refer it to their state's reporting group. That group meets and shares the info on all the recommended books. From that group, final recommendations are then made to NLS with no guarantee that their recommendation will be accepted.*

For authors, the hardest part may be finding patrons of their state's library for the blind... but you already know one patron though probably not in your state, and that is me. You can also make a point of contacting or joining book discussion groups for blind and other print impaired persons, starting, perhaps, with this Google search. You can become part of my Let's Read Historical Novels book club at Accessible World. There is an active group on Yahoogroups for blind book lovers in the UK, nlbbooktalk, which I myself just joined. The information above is for the USA but I will find a good book discussion email group and add it here soon. In the meantime, you can also become a volunteer yourself, either with a local services for the blind or library for the blind or with BookShare.org.

Speaking of BookShare.org, recording -- and Braille transcription for that matter -- is not the only way blind or otherwise print impaired people get books to read. As several earlier posts on this blog will attest, straight text files readable by the audio software on a person's computer work too. You could be so generous as to donate your book to Bookshare.org or even accept requests for the files from anyone you want to give them to, whether or not blind.

If you read this blog regularly you know I have issues with the selection of books made accessible to print impaired people. The federal program is funded by taxpayers, which includes an awful lot of people who have disabilities, and it bothers me that some paternal group of gatekeepers gets to decide what I read. The criteria can be quite outdated. Years ago when asking why there was a dearth of science fiction, I was told that most blind people are old and old people like westerns and romances. Further, there is the lingering librarian bias against independently published books, which just passes the buck to the profit motivated corporate publishing industry. I am a stout believer in letting the consumer decide what s/he wants to read, and as a person with a print impairment, I don't care to be left out of that loop.

* Thanks to Pat Price of Accessible World for this information.