[Missouri-l] [leadership] FW: Report on the LA Times Festival of Books

[peter altschul]

 ---- Original Message ------
From: "Mitch Pomerantz" <mitch.pomerantz at earthlink.net
Subject: [leadership] FW: Report on the LA Times Festival of 
Books
Date sent: Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:12:01 -0700

Colleagues:

I'm forwarding this due to the recognition given to the 
California Council
of the Blind, and to give everyone an update relative to the 
activities of
the Reading Rights Coalition at last weekend's Los Angeles Times 
Festival of
Books.

A special thanks to CCB President Jeff Thom for his public 
support and
particularly to Ken Metz, here in the L.A.  Area for organizing 
CCB's
participation in this activity.


Mitch Pomerantz

  _____

Sent: Tuesday, April 28, 2009 1:35 PM
To: readingrights at daisy.org
Subject: Report on the LA Times Festival of Books


Dear Colleagues:



The Reading Rights Coalition team has returned from the Los 
Angeles Times
Festival of Books, and all who participated feel that our work 
there was
extremely successful.  Let me begin by thanking each one of you 
who
participated in preparing materials, making arrangements, and 
running our
booth at the fair; this work could not have been done without 
you.  Special
thanks is due to the members of the California Council of the 
Blind for
their invaluable assistance during the fair.  With that very 
important bit of
business out of the way, let me briefly report on what happened 
during this
massive event.



For two days, members of the Reading Rights Coalition manned a 
booth to hand
out flyers, solicit signatures for our petition, and inform 
readers,
authors, and publishers about the issue of text-to-speech on the 
Kindle 2.
At different times each day, authors participated in panel 
discussions,
which members of the Coalition attended.  At each of these 
discussions, when
the time came for questions from the audience, we raised the 
question of
whether the authors on stage would support text-to-speech on the 
Kindle 2
for all readers.  Mary Higgins Clark, bestselling writer of 
suspense novels,
and her daughter Carol Higgins Clark, a successful novelist in 
her own right
who also collaborates on works with her mother, agreed before a 
packed crowd
to make sure that all of their works would be available with 
text-to-speech.
Although specifically aware of the objections raised by the 
Authors Guild,
these two popular writers nevertheless affirmed that their own 
works would
be available to readers with print disabilities on the Kindle 2.  
At a panel
called "Writers as Activists," the crowd erupted into spontaneous 
applause
when another activist from our Coalition raised the Kindle 2 
issue and asked
the authors whether they would support text-to-speech for their 
books and
equal rights for readers with print disabilities.  We believe 
that at least
one of these activist authors will soon express public support 
for our
position.  Following this panel, several audience members stopped 
by our
booth to sign the petition.  A number of authors also stopped by 
to add
their signatures, including Randy Shaw, who had previously 
expressed his
support in our press release announcing our participation in the 
Festival of
Books.  The publishers we spoke with were either supportive or 
open to
further discussions with the Reading Rights Coalition.  Public 
support was
overwhelmingly in our favor, with hundreds if not thousands of 
visitors to
our booth signing our petition.



There remains much follow-up work to do in the wake of this 
success, and
tentative commitments expressed to us during the event will need 
to be
nailed down.  In addition, we will need to plan carefully for our 
next moves
in this continuing battle.  While we gained a great deal of 
support, it is
clear from some of our discussions that more work needs to be 
done.  Some
authors were reluctant to make a commitment out of deference to 
their agents
or publishers.  A prominent agent expressed to us the misinformed 
view that
allowing text-to-speech on the Kindle 2 would result in piracy of 
content.
Nonetheless, we feel that a great deal of work was done to 
educate the
public and the book industry about this critically important 
issue and that
the tide is beginning to turn in our favor.



None of this would have happened had we not all come together to 
support the
rights of Americans with print disabilities.  This terrific team 
laid the
groundwork for success at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books 
and will
continue to move forward until the rights of all citizens who 
cannot read
print are protected.



Sincerely:



Chris Danielsen




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