At a very early point in the development of the DAISY standard, talking book readers from many countries were consulted regarding their reading requirements and their vision of a fully accessible audio book. Those who provided input made it very clear that analogue recordings did not meet their reading and information needs. Access to points within the books, awkwardness of the medium itself, sound quality plus numerous other issues indicated that producers of talking books had to begin the move to a digital platform. However, a digitally produced human voice talking book in itself would not resolve all of the issues, particularly the issues of accessibility and navigation from point to point within the book. DAISY DTBs do meet talking book reader requirements by providing access to the talking book that has never before been possible with a human voice production of a print book.
There are different classes of DAISY DTBs starting from audio only or text only up to hybrid books that contain both the full audio and synchronised text. All these classes offer improved access and human voice delivery through links between the digital audio sound files and the marked up text files. It is these links that give the talking book reader access to the structure of the book, like chapters, pages or even paragraphs. The collection of these navigation points in the book is called the Navigation Control Centre or NCC. The NCC makes accessing the information in the book quick and easy.
DTBs produced to the DAISY standard are in and of themselves independent of distribution medium, that is, the digital master file can be archived and may also be distributed on currently available media such as CDs or DVDs. More importantly, as technology advances and digital media distribution methods evolve, these same books can be distributed via the newly developed media or system.
Using de facto standards like MP3 to compress the
audio most of the audio books can be stored on one medium like a CD-rom instead
of many audio cassettes.
To read DAISY books you need a specialized hardware- or software player that give the user access to the information using the NCC.
For more information see the DAISY Consortium web site: http://www.daisy.org