[bksvol-discuss] Re: Bookshare's Purpose in Your Eyes
- From: "Mary Otten" <maryotten@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 09 Jun 2004 13:06:33 -0500
Hi donna,
As long as the vehicle which is enabling us to get these 10,000 books for free
is built on the labor of volunteers, as long as the 10,000 books are not
totally error free, or at least as error-free as those the sighted public
can purchase, as long as we have to wait months or years (in the case of LOC
books, to get the freebees) or some shorter amount of time in the case of
bookshare to get those we pay or work for, then the whole
question of us paying for books is absurd. When the publishers provide full
catalogs of their books in perfect downloadable format that I can take and read
anywhere, just like a sighted person can with a print book,
then we'll talk about me paying for each book I so download. In the mean time,
to be perfectly blunt about it, you're damned right we deserve free books,
because its our labor that's making them accessible in the first
place! The number of books on bookshare which have been donated by publishers
is a very small fraction of those presently available, I'll wager. I'll bet
every single blind person I know would be more than happy to
trade the notion of so-called fre books for error-free portably accessible
books at the exact same prices sighted people can get them at places like
Amazon or Books a Million, plus time limited downloadable free
versions that would be equivalent to what sighted folks get at the local
library. If the publishers want to start talking about providing that same
level of access, then I'll talk about providing the pay. As it is, all of us
work
for literally tens of thousands of hours per year for absolutely nothing in
return, except to be able to enjoy what our hard-copy reading friends can
get either for free or for a relatively small price, at least for
paperbacks. Ask your hard-copy book reading friends if they'd rather pay 7
bucks for a best selling paperback novel, or whether they'd rather have it for
free, providing they put in 2 or 3 hours to scan and then clean it
up. Let's see. For a 7 dollar book, if it took me just 2 hours to scan and
clean, that's 3.50 an hour. Know anybody who wants to work for those wages?
Mary
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