[bksvol-discuss] Re: 550 books in the download queue
- From: "Mary Otten" <maryotten@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2004 18:58:22 -0500
Ken,
When form is messed up, it interferes with meaning and content, and that is my
point. If a book is cluttered by junk that could have been gotten rid of but
wasn't, that book is difficult to read. The more junk, the more
difficult. And so by including such a junk-laiden book, I'm essentially making
a decision that everybody who comes along should just deal with the junk, even
though that junk seriously interferes with one's ability to get
the meaning from the book. I guess I'm beating a dead horse here, but I say,
if its worth submitting, its worth doing what you can to make the text you
present as free from junk as possible. If I submit a cookbook with
many of the numbers messed up and do so on the grounds that its better than
nothing, is it really? If I submit a history book where the dates are trashed,
whereas a careful concentration on the book would have
enabled me to fix them, or an adjustment to the ocr would have minimized the
problem, or both, am I really doing a good thing by submitting the sloppy scan?
When a student comes along and needs that book and
discovers that the dates are hosed, or somebody comes along and starts seeing
lots of junk that could have been cleaned out by some judicious search
operations before the text was submitted, do they think that its
cool that they got the book? Or are they disgusted because the book isn't worth
nearly as much to them as it would have been had the errors and junk been fixed
and cleaned? Again, I'm not calling for perfection. I
know for a fact that things I myself submit are not perfect. But the bottom
line is readability. And when books get accepted with a lot of unreadable junk
in them, whether that is from badly ocr'd headers which didn't get
stripped, from pictures which didn't ocr well, or from whatever other source,
the result is that the content of the book is adversely affected, sometimes to
the extent where a person will just toss it and, what's worse, go
away with a bad impression of BookShare, which they will not be shy about
passing on to their friends.
Mary
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