ReadHowYouWant Has Big Ambitions
By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 2/11/2009 8:35:00 AM
In its first year in business, large print publisher ReadHowYouWant has made 500 titles available in a variety of formats that make them accessible for the visually impaired. The company offers book buyers the option to choose from six different font sizes, ranging from 16 point to 24 point. They are on sale through the company’s Web site and Amazon.com. “By the end of 2009, we hope to make 5,000 titles available,” said ReadHowYouWant CEO Tricia Roth, while speaking at O’Reilly’s TOC conference.
The demographics favor large print: Roth noted that by 2010, some 20 million Americans, age 45 and older, won’t be able to read without corrective lenses. The Australian-based company with offices in the U.S. uses a propriety XML conversion technology to render a book into a format that can easily be rescaled and reflowed on the fly. So far, said Roth, the company has focused initially on titles in the genres of business, inspiration, how-to and health, though it will add additional segments, including fiction in the coming year. In addition, the company will continue to build partnerships and develop new distribution channels, she said. One goal: find a way to better integrate the titles into Amazon’s database so they all appear on the book’s sale page. “Each of our titles has seven distinct ISBNs -- and those that come in multiple volumes have even more -- so it makes it very complicated,” acknowledged Roth.
