The Book People donates £13,000 to RNIB

The Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) has created four talking books for blind and partially sighted children thanks to a £13,000 donation from The Book People.

The Book People donated the money to the RNIB Read campaign, which is aimed at making reading more accessible for blind and partially sighted people.

The accessible titles, which are now available to borrow from RNIB's National Library Service, are: Artemis Fowl and the Last Guardian by Eoin Colfer (Puffin), Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl (Penguin), Demon Dentist by David Walliams (HarperCollins Children’s Books) and Diamond Girls by Jacqueline Wilson (Random House Children’s Publishers).

Becca McRow, RNIB Read Campaign Manager, said she was “delighted” to add the titles to the library service. “Even in 2014, blind and partially sighted people still face an unacceptably small choice of books in accessible formats and RNIB Read aims to raise money to support RNIB's vital reading services."

Earlier this month the RNIB told The Bookseller that publishers need to work more closely with charities to ensure a greater number of books are published in fully accessible formats. 

Currently, only 7% of books published are fully accessible to people who are blind, partially sighted or reading impaired, according to the charity.

Clive Gardiner, RNIB’s head of reading services, said: “We want to work with publishers to get more content, to more people, more quickly. When it comes to accessibility, the areas of weakness are still the overall volume of content and timing. Simultaneous release is something that is very important to us; blind or partially sighted people [have to wait] typically six to nine months to read something their sighted friends have already read.”

RNIB Read is one of The Book People’s charity partners and the bookseller has donated 10% of various workplace sales over the past year.