[bksvol-discuss] Re: Bookshare's Purpose in Your Eyes
- From: "Gary Petraccaro" <garyp130@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2004 22:41:01 -0400
Publishers don't provide complete backlists to anyone. Also, as volunteers,
we have it in our own hands to make our books as error free as those on the
shelves.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mary Otten" <maryotten@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 2004 2:06 PM
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Bookshare's Purpose in Your Eyes
> 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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