[Dtb-talk] digital talking book issue and creating daisy files

[Greg Kearney]

I'll try and give an overview here of what is going on.

The National Library Service for the Blind and handicapped, NLS, is  
asking for funding from congress to convert its existing tape system  
to the DAISY digital talking book standard. DAISY is an international  
standard for digital talking books that permits advanced functions  
such as  page navigation, bookmarking and so on.

The NLS has proposed to replace the tape players with a USB based  
flash memory player designed by Humanware Canada. The books would  
come on a specially designed USB cartage. The NLS players would be  
able to keep track of where you are in many books and, as they will  
have no moving parts, should be more durable than the existing tape  
system.

There have been some concerns expressed that the ease of duplication  
of the books in DAISY format would lead to the pirating of the  
recordings. To counter this the NLS proposal is to encrypt the audio  
of the books as well as the parts of the DAISY book files that tell  
the player the order in which to play the audio. In addition the  
format the audio is in is somewhat unusual as well.

As I said the whole matter is before congress where some questions  
have been raised about the cost of developing the new program given  
the increasing use of commercial recording of books. DAISY has  
significant advantages over standard CD recording not the least of  
which is the navigation and compactness of the recordings. Books that  
would five standard CDs for example can be produced in less than 50  
megabytes in the DAISY format. Had the commercial producers used  
DAISY to start with the funding issue might not have come up. But  
DAISY requires special players and not standard CD playback devices.  
So we need to support NLS's request for funding to make this long  
overdue change over from tape. by contrast some of the European  
libraries have used DAISY for over 10 years now.

DAISY books are produced with special software which takes or in some  
cases makes from text-to-speech recordings and makes a series of  
files known as SMIL which know where the navigation points, be they  
chapters, pages or even paragraphs are. These files, along with some  
other support files are what make up a DAISY book.  DAISY books can  
be a simple as a single recording with no navigation or as complex as  
the Bible which can be navigated to the verse. They can also have the  
original source text included and, on a computer, that text can be  
shown as the book is read. I would note here that the NLS system will  
not have the original source text included. In the spirit of complete  
disclosure I should note that I am the author of one such bit of  
production software the open source DTBmaker.

The issue which has been debated here of late has centered around the  
wisdom of encrypting the audio and other files in the NLS books as  
this make the production of playback software and hardware very  
difficult. I would like to add that no one on this list, as far as I  
recall, has expressed any reservations about the basic plan to switch  
to DAISY only the issue of the encryption system being employed. So  
the debate here has been on a narrow technical detail of a much  
bigger program, one that deserves our support.

I hope this answers your questions and I hope this information is  
correct. I'm sure I will be corrected if not.

Greg Kearney


On Apr 29, 2007, at 03:01 , lisa Kidder wrote:

> Hello All:
>  I am new to the list.  Can someone please explain what is going on  
> with the National Library Service and digital books?  and how are  
> daisy files created? Also, is there a daisy users list? If so, can  
> someone please send me the e-mail address that I would need to use  
> in order to subscribe.
>
> Lisa.
>
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