decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
The insane thing: the book publishers could have prevented this | 310 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
The insane thing: the book publishers could have prevented this
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 29 2013 @ 09:02 PM EDT
This presupposes that the top managers are very intelligent as well as very
greedy...

LECanough

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

The insane thing: the book publishers could have prevented this
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 29 2013 @ 10:48 PM EDT
>Some business mind probably decided "the Braille market is
too small, don't waste the money".

The economics of Braille printing is such, that it is not a
commercially viable operation, regardless of how it gets
sliced and diced.

Taking a Bible that contains the Protestant Canon as an
example. It takes 3,300 sheets of Braille paper, for a
single copy. Paper for that single copy costs US$330. At a
standard wholesale price of US$400, the printer will barely
break even. At the local bookstore, that Bible will retail
for US$1000. The average blind person in the United States
has a gross income of less than US$1,000 per month. Blind
people in other countries earn substantially less.

Take Dan Brown's _Inferno_, as an example. Hardcover is 480
pages. That translates into 1,248 pages in Braille. Paper
alone costs US$63, with the resulting MSRP being around
US$175.00. The upper bound of US sales of that book, in
Braille format, is the number of Braille libraries in the
United States. Offhand, I don't remember how many Braille
libraries there are, but it is under 100.

All that said, there are a number of volunteer
organizations, that will produce Braille volumes, for the
cost of paper. IOW US$63 for Dan Brown's _Inferno_, or
roughly three times the price of the large print paperback
edition from Amazon, or four times the price of the
hardcover from Amazon. Or US$320 for a Protestant Bible,
which is roughly three times the cost of a good leather
bound Bible, six times the cost of a hardcover Bible, and
sixteen times the cost of a paperback Bible.

But Braille is not the only accessible format used by blind
people. There are some who use Moon. I don't have a
worksheet to calculate the price for books that use
that format. If my math is correct, the cheapest option,
using ShapeWays,is around $60 per page.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )