Imagine a future where the mass-produced paperback is regarded as a bookshelf dinosaur; where the reader can buy their favourite story, hand-select their preferred font, text spacing and format, and can switch from the printed word to the spoken and back again.
What if the customised book could bring the joy of stories to the visually impaired and the functionally illiterate as well as the short-sighted chief executive thumbing through his company papers or the struggling HSC candidate who finds reading Shakespeare a strain?
As Anthea Taylor, manager of Vision Australia's Accessible Information Library Services, sees the book of the near future: "The content is produced and you choose the container."
Ms Taylor was speaking at a forum convened last week at the instigation of the Australian Publishers' Association to make reality the provisions of an international agreement to help 300 million people gain access to audio, braille and large-print books.
Australia is a signatory to the Marrakech Treaty that came into force last September and encourages the conversion of books to accessible formats without needing to obtain permission from copyright owners every time.
The translation and distribution technology that makes seamless consumer choice possible is ''years, not decades away'', said Neil Jarvis who was born blind and heads access and innovation at the Blind Foundation of New Zealand.
"Even as we stand here now, there is no barrier," Mr Jarvis said. "The barrier right now is the understanding to do it, and the commitment to standards."
The Australian forum, unique among international signatories, includes representatives from the Department of Education, libraries, publishers, authors and literary agents and the disability community as well as the Copyright Agency and the Australian Digital Alliance, rivals in the copyright wars.
About 44 per cent of Australians are estimated to have low literacy skills. As many as 2.3 million Australians had a print reading disability ranging from dyslexia to low vision.
Inclusion design consultant Greg Alchin said the figures were likely to be much higher with many people under-reporting reading difficulties, and it's a growing market.
"By the age of 55, one in three Australians have a disability, be it temporary, permanent or situational. We are looking at that baby boomer bulge in the market; that's the biggest growth driver for us."
Mr Alchin is urging authors, editors and publishers to adopt a universal digital file format used by the major technology platforms.
''Building awareness and capacity of Australian authors, editors and publishers is the way forward so that eventually all content is inclusive in Australia,'' he said.
''It is not just the right approach from an ethical and moral perspective but it also makes great business sense. We want to create content that includes all of the market and doesn't exclude any of the market. Just as people personalise their driving position, readers should be able to personalise their reading experience."
Progress on accessibility has the potential to transform the classroom, and remove barriers to learning for students with print disabilities and lift flagging national literacy standards.
But it's also a question of making technology user friendly. Digital audio needs to develop beyond a synthetic voice. As one forum member noted, text-to-speech services can be as painful as listening to Stephen Hawking attempt Wordsworth.
And the question of who bears the costs has yet to be settled. Technology devices for the print disabled are only valuable if they can access content. As businesses, these platforms are as reluctant to pay for content conversion costs as aggregators such as Google and Facebook.
Chief executive of the Australian Publishers' Association, Michael Gordon-Smith, said publishers were taking a proactive rather than reactive position in defining the book of the future and he was pleased with the level of co-operation and progress.
In the next 12 months, the forum has committed to publish a plain English guide to accessibility standards, to pilot 10 titles of different types of publications carrying the new standards, finalise copyright guidelines and introduce accessibility fields for Title Page, the industry look-up service, and Trove, the National Library of Australia's repository.
