A Red Letter Day!

I smiled this morning when I reread an interview with me done by Mirella Patzer on The Historical Novel Review. In the interview I make reference to "a red letter day" when I could put the funds together to buy a device that can literally read a print book aloud. That red letter day coincidentally was yesterday!

As someone who has read since she was five, who read constantly all her life, and who took twice as many credits in English literature in college than she needed for her degree, losing my vision was a bit of a setback.. to say the least. "Talking Books" were heaven.. or shall I say Valhalla-sent. But all these years later, a novelist myself now, I am coming to the end of the supply of books for the blind in areas of my narrow interests. Further as I go through my own teeming list of books at medieval-novels.com I face the frustration of books not available in an accessible format, often the books I want to read the most.

Even more important, research has been complicated since I could not just take a book about Saxon England off the shelf and read it. That has necessitated a certain amount of resourcefulness, that amount being remarkable if I say so myself. I found myself communicating with various experts in academia and elsewhere trying to find the information I needed. Academia proved generous.. others outside that area were more inclined to criticize me for not doing the research myself. That is water under the stone bridge over the Trenta.. both well into the past and also no longer relevant.

About six inches from my left hand dancing on my keyboard is the Plustek Book-Reader, a scanner with a difference. it reads what it scans aloud! Immediatley at that! And clearly in a very human sounding voice.

What it changes in my life, personal and professional, is that it takes away the limiting nature of print accessibility. That is, while most people are only limited in what they read by what is available in the library network and in print, I have had to rely primarily on the far more limited budget of the U.S. National Library Services and my state's branch of libraries for the blind. Whether intentional or not, and I am not so paranoid as to think it is, that limit comes from others deciding what people like me will be permitted to read. I am not the first person to point this out, to which the very existence of Our Right to Know Braille Press and the Womyn's Braille Press attests. Braille is even more dramatically limited. I dobn't even need to limit myself to what's available in the U.S. any more. Though scanning and using OCR software to turn a book into digital text was significant, it is amazingly time consuming. Imagine having to scan an entire book before reading it.

Now I have my little friend, pictured on the right, my "magic book" -- maybe I should have a contest to name it! right here at hand.. so the fact that the intricate details of Aethelræd II's reign is no longer beyond me. You know what? Nothing is. Bring it on! Aethelræd may not be, but I am ready!