[bksvol-discuss] Re: BAEN BOOKS
- From: Guido Corona <guidoc@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2008 12:46:45 -0600
Thank you Dave. The problem is that soft breaks are induced by the word
processing package and do not correspond to physical page breaks in the
print copy matching the ISBN in the file. In particular, the book 1812 I
have been examining has approx 250 pages on Kurzweil K1K, 450 pages on MS
Word. Yet Amazon indicates the print copy to have 560 pages. I venture
that Bookshare staff may source Baen book files directly from the
publisher 'en masse' in the most suitable formats, and may process them
uniformly. It is worth pointing out that publishers usually print from
specialized files formats containing page breaks aligned to print copies,
although these print-ready files are not consumer-friendly and are usually
deemed to
be a private/confidential intellectual property of the publisher and are
as such not for sale or public distribution.
G.
Guido Dante Corona
IBM Research,
Human Ability & Accessibility Center, (HA&AC)
Austin Tx.
Phone: 512. 838. 9735.
Email: guidoc@xxxxxxxxxxx
Web: http://www.ibm.com/able
". . . Maybe it was only those who were most certain they were right who
were guaranteed to be wrong. And that maybe, just maybe, those who
questioned the most were in the end those who came closest to being wise."
[David Poyer, The Command]
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[bksvol-discuss] Re: BAEN BOOKS
Pratik,
You're not differing from my point, you're changing the issue
altogether. My difficulty is not with page demarcations, but the
decimal value 13 embedded in a file as a sacrosanct character. There
are other indicators, and ways of knowing that you've moved from page
12 to page 13 without a decimal 13.
Regarding the citation and discussion issue, if you are citing a
source, you indicate copyright, edition, etc. So if you're citing an
electronic version you so annotate, and indicate where it can be found.
My concern here is that we are becoming slaves to minutia. The files
we are perusing here aren't the database at The Center For Disease
Control. No one is going to die because the font isn't quite right,
or there is a page break only every 2 pages, and yes I should note I
said page break not demarcation.
As for adding the Baen books to the collection, I think it's a shame
to schlep them off on the staff when all the e-text versions need, is
for the soft breaks to be replaced by hard breaks. It would seem to
me that the books from O'Reilly and Gutenberg would be a better focus
for the staff, as neither of their's are already in RTF, rather than
the Baen books which are. If the staff gathered all the Baen
offerings, and placed them on the Step 1 page, it would be a simple
matter for the volunteers to go through and put hard breaks where the
soft breaks are. For that matter, as far as the gathering goes, I
would be willing to collect them all and submit them on CD or DVD.
Dave
At 10:11 AM 1/10/2008, you wrote:
>Dave,
>
>I beg to differ. Page breaks, or better yet, page demarcation, is used
in
>the academic area (or anywhere) for citation purposes. Page breaks (or
>control characters thereof) weren't only invented for printing purposes.
>They are there so that intelligent conversations can reference correct
>pages. The emphasis on correct page breaks or pagination is absolutely
>essential for books so long as the sighted world continues to use the
>system. Whether or not this should be the case is an entirely different
>question.
>
>As to the Baen books being scanned or added to the collection by
>Bookshare.org automatically--I'll say this. I'm sure Bookshare has all
the
>intentions to process these books in a quick manner. But, until that
>happens, I'll continue to advocate that volunteers continue to scan books
>that they want to see in the collection immediately.
>
>Pratik
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