Hi. I agree with Donna on general principles, but likewise I think there
is something she might be overlooking. Yes, we can get unlimited access to
books with bookshare.org, provided that they have been scanned. However,
as she points out, they are not all nicely formatted. For my money, I
would like complete synopses, perfect quality, the ability to convert to
plain text rather than trying to convert the DAISY files, etc. However, I
would expect to pay for each book, just as Donna says. You can go to ebook
sites and get all this information whether you are blind or not. No, you
do not get plain text, but there are ways to convert from pdf and other
formats.
However, as I am writing this, I am thinking of something. See my earlier
post on Project Gutenberg. Whether you are blind, sited, a child or adult,
you can get over 12,500 free ebooks from Project Gutenberg. There are no
restrictions at all. Most of them are in the public domain. Almost all of
them are free of scanning errors and would make great Braille
translations. If you want to give them away, go ahead. Is this so
wrong? They have been giving away ebooks for the last 30 plus years. The
only real difference between them and bookshare.org is that with
bookshare.org you pay for the books but you get access to current
bestsellers. PG only offers public domain books, so the cutoff publication
date is 1922. The other difference is that members submit scans to
bookshare.org, but volunteers submit scans to PG. PG has a site called
Distributed Proofreaders (distributedproofreaders.net) which does the
cleaning up of the scans. Three cheers for PG!
I didn't mean to make this a big plug for PG, but I think there are fewer
differences than Donna might think as far as the blind getting unlimited
free books. One would equally have to ask whether PG is a library or
bookstore. If you haven't looked at them lately, check them out. If you
have an RSS reader, you can get new book lists as well. You can also join
mailing lists for weekly or daily reports. They are averaging about 10 per
day for new postings. Donna, you might point out the above to your husband.
