HOMEDAISY Online Delivery
DAISY Consortium Members and Friends have long felt that online Internet
delivery is the clear future for fulfilling the reading demands of
blind and print disabled users. Several organizations and companies have
conducted pilot
projects to explore the feasibility of online delivery. The most notable
of
these have been the Net-Plextalk implementation being deployed by RNIB
and
the pilot initiated in New Zealand.
DAISY Digital Talking Books are normally large. Even using the best MP3 compression, the books average more than 250 megabytes. The unanticipated growth of broadband access and wireless proliferation has surprised even the most enthusiastic connected technologists and has made online delivery of DAISY Digital Talking Books practical for the first time. The explosive growth of broadband and wireless Internet access creates an immediate, imperative need to develop non-proprietary standards to enable online delivery.
The DAISY community is demanding immediate results in the development of non-proprietary protocols that are standardized across international and library boundaries. The most critical specifications are those that define how simple non-PC-based players interact with client services. The protocols must be robust to allow customization by libraries to fit the service models currently being used and yet to be defined.
