Sorry, I can't. If someone reads that and thinks it's a scanning issue, then my reputation is on the line. I pride myself on my scanning, and while I see your point about it saying something about a publisher when a book is poorly edited, I'm not reading the book to analyze the publisher. I'm reading the book to either get information or a good story, and either way, don't need to be distracted by obvious bad editing. To be fair, it really annoys me when I'm reading a printed book, so if I can alleviate that problem for others, so much the better.
Having said al that, if the weird grammar or what-have-you occurs in poetry, I leave it alone. Poetry is so rhythm-dependent that I don't feel right interfering with that.
On 18 Apr 2008, at 03:40, Lora wrote:
As much as those things bug me, too, I want to know what the publisherpublished, not what we changed it to. After all, it says something about a publisher if the editing of a book was poor. More to the point, there are some authors with such peculiar writing styles that it'd be hard to knowjust what they intended to write. William S. Burroughs is an example.Even though those things leap out at me, too, I dodge out of the way, andlet them go merrily by. <Smile> -----Original Message----- From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of eric troup Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2008 2:25 PM To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxSubject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Books rated excellent recently added to thecollection that are really only goodI suppose you're right, but I have a real hard time not correcting things like "He begin to notice he was sweating as the lights dimmed." I know we're not supposed to fix it, but dammit, that's supposed to be "began to notice!" Don't get me wrong, I don't fix sentence structure or anything intrusive like that, but there are times when it was clearly an editor's oops, and I do have a hard time not fixing those. They jump out at me likemuggers on a darkly-lit street. On 17 Apr 2008, at 10:31, Lora wrote:Hi, Like you, I don't do a global find and replace, because that canresult in new and interesting errors that need to be fixed later. Butlike you, when I find an error, I do a find, and replace things on a one at a time basis. Yes, we can spell check as we read. JAWS will announce spelling errors.You just need to make sure it's not announcing grammar errors, too, asthat can become annoying. Many novels don't quite pass the grammar check, and it reports lots of false errors. Besides, we're not here to correct grammar. -----Original Message----- From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Grandma Cindy Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2008 9:50 PM To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Books rated excellent recently added to the collection that are really only good My method is slightly different from yours, though I've thought of doing a spell-check first. However, I don't. I read the book with the spell- check on--I don't know if blind people can do that or if it would be too annoying. I correct as I go, and when I find an incorrect word that us actually a real word but not the right one, I do a find and replace for others--not a global replace, though; I've been caught too many times having changed things that shouldn't have been changed and having to go back and correct them and I've learned my lesson. When I've finished reading the book, I do a final spell-check, and usually I do find a few--very few--words that I've missed--and I do a final page-number check. I don't validate indices or bibliographies, but I don't delete them, either. I offer to do them later if a reader would like me to. G.CindyHi Judy and Others,I am always surprised when I download an excellent book and find thatit's definitely not. Although these books are frustratingdiscoveries, I think the majority of Excellent books are deserving ofthat rating. Getting a book up to that rating is a joint effort, though. Like you, I appreciate the scanners' comments, explaining the validation steps that they followed before submitting the book. It doesn't change my approach to validating, but it informs me of how much time my validation process is likely to take. For what it's worth, I begin by searching for the number 1, in combinations such as 1 1' 1. 1? And so forth. I then search for random characters that typically don't belong in the book: caret, accent, tilde, percent, pound, and so on. By finding theseand eliminating them, if appropriate, I get an overall glimpse of howmuch validating needs to be done. Spell-check or not to spell-check: I then make a determination onwhether I'll run the spellchecker. For most novels and nonfiction, Iwill; but for books such as Buddhism in Action, where I'm battlingtwo spelling problems, lots of Hindi words and lots of scanographicalerrors that resulted in actual words, I've determined that it isn't worth it to run spell check. I'll rely on my full reading of the book to catch errors. I then scan for common scanos, such as die for the and comer for corner. If I don't find lots of these, I figure it's a good sign. I usually then start reading the book. Since I'm going to read straight through, this is when I check things like whether all the pages are there, whether lines are missing, whether certain text is garbled, etc. I've found that there are errors that are better caught with speech, and other errors better caught with Braille. Example: One excellent book I downloaded might have read all right with Braille, but was a nightmare when I read it with speech. This was a book I wanted to read, and one I did read, even though there weren't spaces after quotation marks, resulting in things like, "Ihate this,"she said. (Funny thing is, JAWS reads this just fine, butmy Pacmate tried to run this and she together because there was nospace. It did this all through the book, because neither the scanneror validator went in and put spaces after the quotation marks. This is the kind of thing we need to find good ways to catch. Finally, if the book has indices or other extras, I make a determination as to whether they can be salvaged. I think I've only ever deleted one index, which was very nearly garbled beyond recognition. It was for a very short book, and I felt it didn't add much to the book. As I'm uploading, I review everything that will be visible when the book goes into the collection. For instance, I check the short and long synopses, title, author, publisher, copyright date, ISBN, and the selected categories and adult rating etc., to make sure it looks good. I'm not saying I won't miss things, but this is the rough process I use. One of my frustrations is when a scanner uploads a book and marks it as excellent, and then I open the book and it's clearly not. I downloaded one recently where I found lots of missing words orgarbled lines, and I knew I wouldn't be able to correct it easily. Isimply returned the book to step one, as I figured it'd take moreeffort to fix it than I felt I could manage. I guess I could see howit might have gotten an excellent rating, as there were good-sized chunks of very readable text, but when it went bad, it was really bad. I'd appreciate an honest rating. The book probably deserved good, which at least would have warned potential validators that it would require a fair bit of work. May I ask scanners how they determine whether to rate their submissions as good or excellent? And I'd love to see Bookshare scan the book on initial submission, and offer a potential rating. Does it do this yet? I know it's something we've talked about in the past. Finally, I'd love to see a way to leave a comment as to why a validator returned a book to step one. This could include commentssuch as: Frequent Hindi words; not familiar enough to validate ... Orhas lots of pictures that will require interpretation by a sighted person ... Or even ... This book has too many errors for me to validate at this time. I hope there's value in some of this. Mostly, it's just me thinking publicly. -----Original Message----- From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Judy s. Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2008 5:08 PM To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxSubject: [bksvol-discuss] Books rated excellent recently added to thecollection that are really only goodLet me add my 'ditto' to the complaints posted here today about booksentering the collection recently that aren't up to snuff. I was just crabbing off-list to Grandma Cindy about this last week. I've downloaded several books this last month that had just entered the collection which had many obvious errors, but were rated excellent. I've certainly missed stuff myself when validating, even though I read through every single book I validate, but the errors Ifound in downloaded books were things like chapter after chapter with"1" instead of "I" in the text. As a validator, I appreciate scanners like Shelley and Mayrie (and many others) who put in their comments whether or not they've read the scan through, if they've spell-checked it, stripped headings, verified page numbers and the like. I'm much more likely to download a book from the step 1 list if thatinformation is available, because I know what to expect and can judge how much time I will have to allocate to give that book the attentionit might need. Judy s. To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list of available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line. To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list of available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line.***WISH LIST (CALLED REQUESTED ADDITIONS TO THE BOOKSHARE COLLECTION)IS AVAILABLE AT http://people.delphiforums.com/jamiecalton/Book_Requests.htm http://www.friendsofbookshare.org/ http://studentpages.alma.edu/~07jmyate/book_requests.htm A LIST OF BOOKS CURRENTLY BEING SCANNED IS AVAILABLE AT http://people.delphiforums.com/jamiecalton/scanning.html Jake's site for useful links: http://www.jbrownell.com/bkslinks.html ______________________________________________________________________ ______ ________ Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list of available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line. 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