Sights set on books for all

This is what happened to Ken Reid. All through his teens and into his twenties, Reid was a keen reader. He loved going to bookshops and browsing around or picking up bits and pieces from secondhand dealers. He read widely and often.

And then he started to lose his sight - and suddenly his bookshelves shrank to nothing. The cause of Reid's blindness was the genetic condition retinitus pigmentosa (Reid was the first in his family to be diagnosed with it) and by the time he was told he had the condition - when he was 26 - he had already lost about 60-70% of his sight; by the time he was 30 he was registered blind; by the time he was 35, he had stopped reading altogether.

"It was a shock," admits Reid, who is now the chairman of RNIB Scotland. "I have been a reader for most of my life - in fact, I was a voracious reader and always had a book on the go. After I lost my sight, it was literally: what am I going to do?"

The options were limited. Many bestsellers are turned into audio books, but they can be expensive (sometimes as much as 10 times the cost of a regular book). There is also braille and large print, but the book you would like to read is not always available in those formats. One estimate is that only 7% of books published in any year are available in braille, audio and large print. It means that for the blind or partially sighted, they can read only a tiny proportion of the books that are out there.

The RNIB wants to do something about this, and is already turning about 600 books into talking books every year. For the past 10 years, the organisation has also launched a new accessible book at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and this year it is Elsewhere, a collection of short stories in four volumes that features writers such as AL Kennedy, Julia Donaldson, Roddy Doyle and Michael Morpurgo.

The RNIB has transformed the collection into a braille and audio version, in which the stories are read by the authors or the RNIB's regular narrators, and will launch it today as part of the opening weekend of events at this year's festival.

It is a fine collection, with some great readings, but at RNIB Scotland's headquarters off Dumbarton Road, Glasgow, everyone says much more needs to be done. The operation at RNIB HQ is impressive: it's a small team but every year it not only puts out a selection of Scottish titles in one of the three accessible formats (braille, audio, large print) it also offers a service in which it will transcribe any book an RNIB member requests. It means readers can get access to a childhood favourite again, or a non-fiction title that is out of print - any book they want, in fact.

The aim of the RNIB's festival event is to highlight this good work, but also to underline the need for more titles to be made available to people with sight loss. Reid says the need is urgent as some people who lose their sight will simply give up books altogether.

"There are huge numbers of people out there who used to read, who have lost their sight for one reason or another and are no longer reading," he says. "People will then get depressed because they are bored, they are lacking stimulus."

There are certainly lots of audio books available, although Reid points out these are aimed at the sighted market and are seen as a premium product with a premium price. "Blind people aren't using audio books for that reason - they are doing it because it's the only way they can read. So for us to be charged a premium is unfair."

Another problem is it can often take a long time for an audio book to be published, which leaves readers with sight problems behind the curve. For instance, Reid was dying to read Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy when everyone was talking about it, but the audio version was not published until a year later, by which time the buzz had faded. It is not uncommon for this to happen with audio books (a notable exception is JK Rowling, a supporter of the RNIB's work, who insists print and audio are published simultaneously).

Reid and his colleague Pam Chater, who runs the RNIB offices in Glasgow, say there are a number of steps that could be taken to improve the situation, by both the Government and publishers. VAT applies on audio books, for example, which does not help; publishers will also often issue their books in a format that makes it tricky to convert to braille. RNIB Scotland would also like publishers to allow it to duplicate audio books for their library - at the moment, this only happens sporadically.

"Our aim," says Chater, "is to make publishers aware there are people out there who love reading but can't get their hands on enough books because they are not being made accessible. I have heard people say they can't read the next book in a series because it's not available and they get really frustrated. Why should you be discriminated against because you can't read print?"

One sign of hope is digital technology and the changes in publishing that have seen more books going straight to devices such as Kindle. In theory, this should be marvellous for blind or partially sighted people, but the picture is patchy. Not all e-readers have a facility to make the print larger and although some of the devices will read the print aloud, the synthetic voices used are not pleasing. It's like having a bedtime story read to you by a Dalek.

"In principle," says Reid, "e-publishing will change the landscape entirely. Of the top 1000 books, more than 80% in 2012 were in an accessible e-book format, although some readers do not have access to the technology to allow them to access e-books." Reid is also not a fan of the mechanised voice. "I listen to my computer speaking to me like that all day," he says. "When I switch off, I want a person to read to me."

The stories in the Elsewhere collection have been read by a mix of actors and authors, including AL Kennedy. Kennedy says she was amazed when she first learned visually impaired people in the UK had such a limited range of books to choose from.

"Even though the RNIB does great work, it has limited funds and many priorities," she says. "I had, perhaps like many people, thought all books were simply converted to audio as a matter of course. This isn't the case and, as I care about reading and would be lost without free access to books, I am passionately in favour of supplying as many titles as possible. I was proud to have my novel Paradise made available and I am happy that the Elsewhere collection will be there for visually impaired people with a taste for literary fiction."

Nick Barley, director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, feels much the same way. This year's RNIB launch is the 10th anniversary of the event and Barley sees it as symbolic of the need to ensure books are available to everyone in society. The RNIB is also pleased with the symbolism - for once, an event for the blind has equal status to an event for the sighted.

The need to ensure books are available to everyone has always seemed a particularly worthwhile message for us to help give a voice to," states Barley, "one that lies at the very heart of what we want to achieve with the festival. It's been wonderful to welcome writers like Julia Donaldson, James Kelman, Janice Galloway and AL Kennedy under the RNIB Scotland banner - that's a pretty stellar list by any literary standards. I think it shows the commitment writers of all kinds of books have to trying to making their books accessible to people with sight loss."

RNIB Scotland would like more publishers to show that commitment. It costs about £2500 to turn a book into braille or audio - and more for large print - but the RNIB sees it as a question of fairness. It believes it should be possible to have every new book in an accessible format. It believes, in other words, in bookshelf equality.

For information and details of how to obtain a copy of Elsewhere, email glasgowtrans@rnib.org.uk or call 0141 337 2955. For general information see www.rnib.org.uk/scotland.