You should learn three things from the first sentence of this post
My primary Bible is a large-print edition.
(You learned: I have a large-print Bible. Break that down and you also learn that I have multiple Bibles and probably poor eyesight. These things are likely unrelated. You may also make the assumption that I am interested in the Bible either scholastically or religiously, or both.)
I bought it years ago when I started studying my faith more seriously. I found that reading that tiny, tiny print on those thin pages was unbearable for more than a few chapters. I’ve always had poor eyesight (I have no memories of not wearing glasses), and there’s about a 50/50 chance that I will eventually go blind. Yay, degenerative eye conditions. But the point is I found it much easier to read the large-print Bible simply because the default font for most Bibles is so damn small.
Most books don’t have this problem. In fact, pick up most bestseller hardcovers and the type is actually pretty large. The Jane Smiley book I’m reading right now happened to be printed in about 12-pt type, I think, which is fine for a book. On my Kindle I use the second-smallest font size setting. But every so often I’ll come across a book that is just too small for me to read without straining my eyes. Mass-market paperbacks are worse than most, and though I don’t’ read them often, I have to wonder if that’s partly because of the strain on my eyes.
But try to find a large-print edition of most books. You can’t. If you’re lucky, the book you want is published by one of the big houses and is written by a big author. By that I mean James Patterson, Danielle Steel, Knopf/Doubleday, etc. But Amy Hempel? No. Tobias Wolff? Not a chance. Raymond Carver? Not even him. Lorrie Moore? You’re lucky there—one of her books is available in large print, though it illustrates the problem with large-print editions: prohibitive cost.
Check out the Amazon page for A Gate at the Stairs, and you can buy the paperback (pre-order) for $10.12. A hardcover edition will run you $17.13, deckle-edge included. Have trouble reading smallish print? Splurge for the large-print hardcover, which costs $33.95. So, for the cost of the large-print edition, you could buy yourself the hardcover and also buy the paperback for a friend, and have $6.70 left over, enough to pick up a used copy of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital. Yikes. And this is not unusual. The markup for the following books, taken from the Amazon website:
James Patterson, The 9th Judgment: $5.29
Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol: $2.95, but that’s the different between a hardcover regular-print and a paperback large-print. Seriously.
Stephenie Meyer, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner: $3.18, which doesn’t seem like much, except the price for the regular edition is only $7.69, so that’s still an almost 40% increase.
Mary Higgins Clark, The Shadow of Your Smile: $20.75
Danielle Steel, Southern Lights: $10.49
(Just for fine I thought I’d compare magazine prices, too. Reader’s Digest costs $10.00 for a one-year subscription. Large-print? How about $27.96. That’s almost three times the cost.)
Going Rogue, on the other hand, is priced the same whether you want regular or large-print. And Ted Kennedy’s memoir is only $1.44 more. Politicians, apparently, are all about the elderly and/or almost blind readers.
Okay, so you get the point. And the point is twofold: it costs a crapload more to read large-print editions, and you also have an awful selection. Amazon, for example, lists the following numbers of books:
All books: 19,009,706
Large-print books: 75,503.
That’s less than half a percent. And, while half a percent is about how many actually good books there are, most of the large-print editions are of course those NYT bestseller authors.
But I don’t have it that rough, at least not yet. Want to know how many Braille books Amazon lists?
Do you?
Really?
Guess.
Wrong.
Still wrong.
Nope. Try half that.
How about this: 80. Eighty. 8-0. Enough that I could put them all on one bookcase and still have room for my complete Transformers Generation 1 DVD collection. That’s mildly disgusting.
Now, this doesn’t mean there aren’t alternative-format books available in the world. Some big publishers, like Random House and Doubleday have dedicated large-print websites. But, again, Braille is a whole other story.
That’s why I’m so impressed with National Braille Press. They’re a non-profit in Boston, and for more than eighty years they’ve been working to bring Braille publications to the masses. They translate books into Braille and are dedicated to ensuring that children have access to textbooks and tests in Braille alongside their visually-normal peers. They’re also trying to bring down the cost of Braille publications so they’re in line with regular print, which is a great goal. I think that’s fantastic, and they’re on my list of entities to donate to. They may even move ahead of NPR soon. (Alternatively, you could just try to cure blindness.)
There’s also hope for Braille books coming to e-readers. Sounds crazy, right? But almost exactly a year ago there was a lot of hubbub over electroactive polymers being used to create raised text on a tablet device. And while there’s been essentially no news since, I still have my fingers crossed that once ebooks become more common, one of the big players in the market will be willing to take a chance on building a Braille e-reader, so that the NBP can start translating work to that format, and maybe the International Electronic Braille Book Library can start moving its library of electronic texts to e-readers as well.
Now, I understand there are market conditions that prevent even pricing between standard books and alternative-format books. There will probably never be as many people buying large-print books as standard, so the cost will always be higher. But if I’m a writer trying to publish a new book, I have an interest in making sure it’s a readable size at least, and hopefully available in alternative formats for little extra costs. This is where Braille translation software and espresso book machines may come in handy; if I want a copy of Pastoralia in 16-pt font, I should be able to punch in that requirement to the machine and it’ll update the book appropriately, charging me for the extra pages it has to print but in the end not resulting in a 50-200% rise in cost. And maybe, just maybe, within a couple of decades there will be at least one book-binding machine in every city that can emboss pages and print in Braille. Sure, it’ll cost more, but these machines are supposed to decrease overall costs, and if fifteen years from now I can get a Braille book for close to what a hardcover costs today, I’ll be more than happy. Because in ten years or twenty years or maybe not for forty years, I’m going to need that feature. And there’s no reason it shouldn’t happen. I’ll be praying for it, large-print Bible and all.
I think you just made an excellent argument for why one of the reasons why libraries are still important.
Good! I’ll take that any time I can get it! But if you’ve been to the local library lately, you’ll notice that the large-print section is about three shelves. Of course, they can hopefully be repositories for more Braille books. I also think they’d be great places for those espresso book machines. Maybe a way to generate some income for libraries?
I think that depends on the library. My friend who works for the Los Angeles city library orders at least one large print and one Braille (if available) copy of every title they purchase.