I started volunteering again for the first time in years and years today. I’ve picked up a couple of hours a week at the Washington Talking Book and Braille Library, which I figure is a good opportunity for me to learn more about actual librarianship, work to help an underserved community, and get a chance to give back to the community in general.
It was a very interesting first day. I was given a crash course in the technology side of the library, including tutorials on how to load audio books onto two different types of devices, and being shown some of the devices they’ve used over the past several decades. They used to lend out record albums of books! Now it’s a cartridge-based system, and as far as I can tell the from the quick glance at the internals I got, cartridges are basically USB drives in a durable, easy-to-orient case. The player is provided free to anyone that uses their services, and the shipping of cartridges is free, too. It’s really cool how much they can help without paying, especially given how much more elaborate their operation has to be to account for the fact that they’re lending books out all over the state.
It also turns out that it’s only sort of a state library. While the funding comes from the state, and they’re embedded within state systems (they get tech support from WA state, for example), they’re also a part of a national system of libraries that serve the disabled run under the auspices of the Library of Congress.
All in all, it was wonderful. It seems like they have a lot of volunteers help with every aspect of the operation, from helping them record audio books and transcribe documents into braille, to shipping, to doing reader advisory and entering books into the system. I hope I can contribute to the library in a meaningful way, and that if I pick up a job soon that I can make the hours work in such a way that I can keep volunteering. (The library itself is closed over the weekend, otherwise that would be my master plan.)
There was one issue I was frustrated with, but that wasn’t due to the library itself. Rather, it’s due to a technology company being shitty. One of the devices many of the patrons use to listen to library materials, the HumanWare Stream, is completely ridiculous. The device itself makes a lot of sense: essentially a chunky digital audio player with no screen, wifi so you technically don’t need a computer to get books, an audio menu navigation system, and a physical button interface. It uses SD cards as the memory to store book files. So far so good. The issue? This thing costs OVER THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS. $369 at time of this writing, to be exact.
This fucking thing! (Image Source)
What the fuck?
This thing could be made using off-the-shelf parts, even at retail consumer part prices, for a lot less. For example, take a Raspberry Pi, a phone battery, and a board of physical buttons. Probably 3D print the case if it’s a one-off. Boom, done. Okay, not really. You’d probably have to load up some code libraries for text to speech functionality, and I’m not really sure how integrating it with the DRM used by the BARD audiobook loan system would work. Still, assuming open source support (or the gumption to program the missing bits you need yourself), you could probably stick one of these together for less than $100, easy.
The only thing I can (rashly?) conclude is that HumanWare is taking advantage of the narrow market for its devices in order to price gouge. After all, they’re probably one of very few games in town, and people will pay, right? It’s even worse with the refreshable braille displays, which from HumanWare, at least, start at nearly a thousand dollars, and from what I understand that’s pretty standard.
I think there’s a great opportunity here for the open source community to make a huge difference in the lives of a lot of people. I want to look into it more, see how feasible (or not) it is to make an alternate device, even if only as a proof of concept. People shouldn’t have to pay out the nose for something so essential to day to day life.
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