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Embracing Defeat
3/5. An exhaustive – and occasionally exhausting – survey that I read slowly over six months, and thus have very little specific to say about. But for purposes of setting a placemarker here, can I just complain for a second about how difficult it is to find specific nonfiction that is more than six or seven years old in an accessible form? Grr. I read this in place of the well-regarded and personally intriguing recent political history of Japan that I wanted, but that is apparently not for the likes of me. One of the talking points we used in a small political push five years back was that less than 1% of the world's books were in a form accessible to the print disabled. The number is higher now, but if it's risen more than a few points, I'd be shocked. What must it be like to want a book and to just . . . be able to buy it and read it? Or to borrow a copy from a friend! What is that like? TBF, I remember when book inaccessibility was a real, daily, awful problem I had. Now it's like . . . a weekly problem. Progress? It helps a lot not to be in school anymore, and Bookshare is taking heroic strides, and of course the audio market exploded. But still. Still. There's a reason I read a lot of recent releases by major publishers and don't read a lot of small press stuff from any era.
3/5. An exhaustive – and occasionally exhausting – survey that I read slowly over six months, and thus have very little specific to say about. But for purposes of setting a placemarker here, can I just complain for a second about how difficult it is to find specific nonfiction that is more than six or seven years old in an accessible form? Grr. I read this in place of the well-regarded and personally intriguing recent political history of Japan that I wanted, but that is apparently not for the likes of me. One of the talking points we used in a small political push five years back was that less than 1% of the world's books were in a form accessible to the print disabled. The number is higher now, but if it's risen more than a few points, I'd be shocked. What must it be like to want a book and to just . . . be able to buy it and read it? Or to borrow a copy from a friend! What is that like? TBF, I remember when book inaccessibility was a real, daily, awful problem I had. Now it's like . . . a weekly problem. Progress? It helps a lot not to be in school anymore, and Bookshare is taking heroic strides, and of course the audio market exploded. But still. Still. There's a reason I read a lot of recent releases by major publishers and don't read a lot of small press stuff from any era.
