History
Prior to the twenty first century the publishing industry focused on the production of printed books. The predominant publishing theory was based around increasing the economy of scale of the books by only having one format available. In this way books could be mass produced and made available for the general public. This model did not allow for any other format to be widely available, however.
There were a number of developments in technology that increased the accessibility of books. The first of these was the development of the Braille language by Louis Braille in 1821. After this there was the development of audiobooks which originated from the United States Congress in 1931 and became popularised by advances in recording and the use of voice actors.
In 1980, Thorndike Press came into existence as a republisher of large print books. Thorndike bought the rights for large print versions of books from publishers and then republished them in a larger and more accessible format for people with reading difficulties.
Read more about this topic: Accessible Publishing
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