It is widely assumed that every book that is produced is also somehow produced in Braille and on audio format and blind people thus enjoy the same range of books and contemporary cultural materials as sighted people. This is not the case, not by a long chalk ... not by a long long long long long long long long long long chalky bit of chalked up chalk.

The new craze is to scan books into text formats and then share them with people all over the Internet, it's illegal but it's a key part of blind culture now and spreading like wildfire. Starved of books, blind people have a strong disregard for copyright ... this proliferation of scanned texts could easily undermine the emergence of the E-Book industry.

Let me just explain how I, a blind person, currently go about trying to get hold of a contemporary book to read. It's likely that a new book would be brought to my attention either because it has been mentioned on a TV or radio show or one of my friends or colleagues has raved about it. The next step is to think close to home, you hope it may already have been produced in braille or on cassette by the bastions of the blind publishing industry, namely: The National Library for the Blind (Britain's biggest braille book producer) or perhaps on RNIB's exclusive Talking Book format. These services are lending libraries. I don't know why I still bother trying these two roads because usually it takes a good year or two for a book to reach these easy-to-hand formats, and far more often that books don't make it into these formats at all. When they do though, it is quite good because they are unabridged unlike the audio books you see on the shelves of book stores which are mostly heavily edited containing only about 30% of the author's original word count. Blind people on the whole do not appreciate abridged books.

There are one or two other much smaller cassette book services for blind people it should be noted (e.g. Calibre) who surprisingly can be far more up to date with their choice of titles, but lack of choice of contemporary titles is still a major issue.

The next step is to call up Isis or Cover2Cover or The Talking Book shop in London - or visit their respective websites. Again this usually ends in disappointment as unabridged books are rarely recorded on tape until some time after publication of the print version, but again here, usually not at all. When they are available in this format it's a brilliant find because they are read very well by paid professional actors whereas some books on other services are read by stumbling or unanimated volunteers.

It should be noted at this point that blind people do not expect access to books for free! No, rather the situation is such that blind people will routinely pay around 40 pounds for an unabridged audio book rather than not read it at all. This is at least 6 times more expensive than a bog standard paperback book filling the shelves of Waterstones in abundance. With 70% of blind men unemployed and 90% of blind women, they have a lot of leisure time but little money. Reasonably priced access to books then would seem a rather important consideration.

So, after all that, if I still want to read the book I have to get a friend to read it aloud to me or resort to technology. I have a scanner hooked up to my PC and if I feel inclined I can go out, buy a book and then laboriously scan the book onto my hard disk page by page by page. This is an imprecise way of getting a digital text version of a book, will always miss out words, have spelling mistakes, misread 3's as E's, 5's as S's and I's as l's, and some fonts it jus can't cope with. But all that aside, it can take upwards of 5 to 8 solid hours of repetitive page lining up, keyboard pressing, the inevitable computer crashing, repetitive repetitive repetitive strain and boredom syndrome taking up an entire working day. This kind of computer setup will cost a couple of thousand pounds. All this effort and expense results in an imperfect digital document that sighted people could have wandered into Waterstones and grabbed in a fraction of a lunch hour, for a fraction of the price and then opened and read on the tube on the way home.

NLB produces around 500 braille books a year currently (compared to the 100 thousand published print books yearly) and after many decades of the existence of RNIB Talking Book there are still less than 13 thousand titles to choose from.

These two organisations are charities though and cannot necessarily be criticised for the small number of titles they produce in comparison to print publications. however the choice of titles they publish ought to be closely questioned. The people who decide what books should be published in Braille and talking book are our cultural gatekeepers, a role of extraordinary importance. Their choice dictates what blind people get to read. They control our education as well as our cultural intake. Marx would have referred to these media producers/gatekeepers as "the owners of the means of production of media for blind people" or something like that. An awesome and powerful role to have.

Fantastically though, there is a general sense that E-Books are on the horizon. Blind people are very computer literate, accessing computers using speech synthesizers and Braille displays. The Internet has been a godsend, we can now all access and read daily newspapers for instance as well as a wealth of other materials. So, it would seem that E-Books would be the answer: publish an E-Book and both sighted and blind people will be able to access it. Unfortunately the software manufacturers and big publishing companies are in danger of giving blind people little or no access to many of the eBook systems springing up. Although it's accepted blind people cant read old-fashioned print and paper books, there is no reason in the world why blind people shouldn't have full access to all eBooks. If blind people were excluded in any way, this would be a travesty extraordinaire and quite difficult to understand or deal with if you happen to be blind.

In the meantime, as publishers sort out their little secure non-pirateable methods of E-Publishing, blind people are illegally sharing the books they have painstakingly scanned onto their computers - as described earlier. It's a blind Napster, it's the starved of books equivalent to the "have you got any good stuff" talk from drug users. Why bother spending a whole day scanning a book onto your computer when someone else somewhere in the world has done it already? Book sharing across the Internet is now an integral part of blind culture. There are no copyright protection methods on these manually scanned eTexts, not like the E-Book formats currently have. Blind people can freely share their book files with no problem at all. In America www.bookshare.org facilitates this process to an extent, literally a kind of Napster sharing mechanism for blind people. It won't take long before these eTexts spread into the wider world and publishers through excluding blind people from their eBook plans are effectively shooting themselves in the foot as more and more books are being illegally hurled around the Internet without any money changing hands and no consideration for the rights of the author. Why should blind people care about publishers rights if they don't care about ours?

There have been some recent attempts to fix the access difficulties blind people have with current eBook formats, however they are not entirely satisfactory. The sometimes ridiculous workarounds that have been produced by the likes of Microsoft Bookreaderr have attempted to provide an 'add on', a speech synth file which is so painfully slow to read that an E-version of War and Peace would likely not be finished before the end of the current War Against Terrorism.

In the future, the traditional mass Braille and tape publishing for blind people may be shunted to one side in this E-Book age. The braille and tape producers would not have quite the same important role as the responsibility for blind people's access to books moves squarely into the hands of the big publishers in conjunction with the big software houses producing the 'reading software'. it will be the mainstream publishers who determine whether they make their books accessible in E-Formats or not, so in a few years time it will be they who will be receiving my gate keeping anxiety allegations.