Call for more audiobooks for blind people at Edinburgh Book Festival More than 90% of books published in the UK are inaccessible to blind and partially-sighted people, a charity has warned. The Royal National Institute of Blind People Scotland revealed the problem ahead of the launch a new book at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. The title, a short story collection called "Elsewhere," joins the RNIB's library of 21,000 audio, braille and large-print books. RNIB Scotland director John Legg said: "The Book Festival is the biggest literary gathering in the world to celebrate the sheer joy of reading but for people with sight loss their choices are limited in the extreme. Only seven percent of books published make it into all accessible formats. We want our event this afternoon to show there is a demand for more books for people with sight loss, and that authors want their work to be available to all. This is the tenth year we have launched a transcribed book at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. We've had tremendous support from the Festival organisers. But we still need to persuade publishers to produce more books in accessible formats. Too often, those made available commercially are expensive, abridged and released years after mainstream publication. The RNIB's Talking Books library has 40,000 subscribers across the UK and in 2012 it issued 1.5m books to them. The average audiobook takes up to three months to record at a cost of £2500.