BOSTON (AP) – Like millions of Harry Potter fans, Katherine Moss can’t wait to get her fingers on a copy of the sixth entry in J.K. Rowling’s best-selling series.
And for once, the 16-year-old blind student won’t have to wait months longer than her sighted friends to dive into “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.”
The book goes on sale at midnight Friday. A Braille edition is due out three days later – much earlier than with previous Harry Potter books, thanks to a new arrangement between the publisher, Scholastic Inc., and the National Braille Press in Boston.
Moss, a student at the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, doesn’t want the book read aloud to her. She wants to savor each word of the text at her own pace.
“When I read it in Braille, it takes me a lot longer,” she said. “That’s a good thing. Usually, I don’t want it to end. That’s how much of a reader I am.”
For the first time, Scholastic provided the National Braille Press with an advance copy of the Harry Potter book, which is kept under tight wraps.
For the past two weeks, more than four dozen employees at the Boston printing house have been working overtime to print a batch of 800 Braille copies of the “Half-Blood Prince.”
Tanya Holton, NBP’s vice president of development, said it usually takes months, if not a year or two, for published books to make it into Braille form.
“This is the only book we have blitzed like this before, because readers are clamoring for it,” Holton said.
At 1,100 pages, the Braille edition is nearly twice as long as the hardcover version. It comes in nine volumes, takes up 131/2 inches of shelf space and weighs about 11 pounds.
Each Braille book costs $62 to produce, but the nonprofit NBP is selling them for $17.99 – the same as Amazon.com, according to Holton. A local lumber retailer donated $100,000 to help make up the difference.
“This is not about charity. It’s about parity,” Holton said. “We’re not here to make a profit. We’re here to get books in the hands of children. A blind kid deserves the same books as a sighted child.”
A blind reader’s options are relatively limited, however. Only 500 to 600 new Braille titles are published each year – only about 1 percent of all books published, according to Kim Charlson, the Perkins School’s library director.
“Braille is such an important skill,” said Charlson, who is blind. “Nothing compares to a kid being able to read for themselves.”
Moss is still waiting for a Braille version of Katherine Paterson’s “Lyddie,” a 1991 book about a young girl’s struggle to survive poverty in 19th-century New England.
“A lot of books aren’t available in Braille,” she said. “I don’t like that. I don’t like that at all.”
At the Perkins School, the waiting list for the new Harry Potter book already has at least two dozen names. More than 300 people have pre-ordered the book from NBP.
“It’s so important for blind children to have access to the same cultural phenomena at the same time as their peers,” Holton said.
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