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For most subscribers to this website, this post might seem like a tempest in someone else’s teapot. It is a complaint about recent changes in the Library of Congress’s talking book program designed primarily to benefit visually impaired people. However, some of these changes appear to reflect current trends in mainstream publishing, as I’ll argue at the end.
The Library of Congress’s talking book unit, which goes by the name National Library Service, (NLS), is “a free braille and talking book library for people with temporary or permanent low vision, blindness, or a physical, perceptual, or reading disability that prevents them from using regular print materials.” Until around 2023, NLS gave patrons the necessary information about each book, but inexplicably, it has since cut back and is now denying patrons important information that all sighted people can obtain at a glance.
Perhaps the most glaring change is that NLS has stopped showing publication dates. If I want to read the latest book that NLS has produced on, say, Ukraine or developments in medicine, I have no way, based on these descriptions, to determine which Ukrainian history or health-related book to download. If I want to read the first in a character-connected series, I can pull up the names of every title NLS has produced in that series, but I can’t tell which was the first or, for that matter, the latest. Good luck if I want to read the series’ novels in sequence. I’d need to turn to Google, but why make this extra step necessary?
The rationale, to the extent I understand it from an April 10, 2023 email that NLS sent me, is that the Library of Congress has been inconsistent in treating dates as that of the copyright or the first date of publication. This flaw could easily be remedied by calling it “Copyright or original publication date,” or in other ways. To withhold the date completely was categorically the wrong solution.
Every other book supplier and reviewer, from publishers to booksellers to low-traffic opinion websites, includes copyright/first publication dates alongside titles and authors. NLS, on which thousands of disabled readers rely, is alone in withholding this data.
Back in 2023, NLS did agree to restore copyright/publication dates. That summer, they promised they’d be restored by the fall. The fall arrived, but when I pointed it out, they observed that it was still the fall. The winter solstice came and went, and still no copyright/publication dates. Now two years have gone by, and it remains an unkept promise.
NLS also used to produce in-house summaries that were helpful and concise. Now they rely exclusively on publishers’ summaries. See my post “Superbloke: A Publishers’ Summary” for a description of these summaries and a fictional example.
Each morning NLS issues a list of the titles they made available the day before, often numbering in the dozens, and each is accompanied by a publisher’s summary. It doesn’t take long before all the cliché-ridden blurbs run together in one mindless rush to forgettability.
Admittedly, in this instance I’m up against a dilemma. If sighted readers are forced to endure publishers’ summaries, why should visually impaired people get preferential treatment? I want to say, must we use egalitarian reasoning to justify a lowering of standards? But if resort to publishers’ summaries saves government money, it seems there’s nothing more to say.
NLS provides a valuable service to disabled people. No doubt eliminating in-house book summaries cut costs, but at what a cost! Meanwhile, I can imagine no justification, cost-savings or otherwise, for withholding copyright/original publication dates.
NLS honored me by adding my novel Caroline to their collection. Moreover, although I’ve written over and over to NLS to argue for these and other changes, the staff has nearly always responded courteously. I regret the need to criticize their decisions.
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A fundamental problem is that some of NLS’s decisions reflect today’s state of publishing, which I imagine as a line of sculptured figures whose heads are all turned around. Publishing is controlled by a tiny number of large, multinational, multi-layered corporations, and literary agents second-guessing what they want. So we have publishers looking over their shoulder at what they perceive to be reader interest, agents looking over their shoulder to fathom what publishers believe readers want, and authors looking over their shoulder and producing what they think agents think publishers think the public wants.
Commerce has always been crucial to art. Michelangelo created sculptures to satisfy his employer, the Church. One could make a strong argument that there’s little or no point to an artistic product that can’t find a sponsor or buyer. But I doubt the artistic world has been driven so relentlessly by second-guessing gatekeepers.
By whipping up foreseeable passions, publishers’ summaries are a symptom of this malaise. That it is so easy to satirize them, as my “Superbloke” post demonstrates, is a sign of how pernicious they are.
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