[bksvol-discuss] Re: Bookshare's Purpose in Your Eyes
- From: Tony Baechler <bookshare@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 09 Jun 2004 23:13:12 -0700
At 12:47 PM 6/9/2004 -0500, you wrote:
You raised a lot of points in your post. First, regarding the author who
didn't donate a copy of his book because he saw no others on that topic,
its obviously his right, but that's one darned lame excuse if you ask me.
Hey, I agree. I thought he was a bit difficult to deal with also. I wish
it was only that one author though. He was the only one outspoken about
it, but I know of at least two other authors who have considered donating
but for no apparent reason changed their minds. Obviously they are
paranoid about the piracy issue and I don't blame them, but I wonder if
that is their only reason. I realize that old time radio is not of
interest to everyone here, but surely there is someone else besides me? I
think that if there was even one book about that subject, at least one
author would probably donate more books. My general idea is to spread the
word. If one author donates, he will mention it to other authors. They go
to conventions and might mention it to others and so forth. This could
eventually come back to help us all as some totally unknown author (to me)
might decide that we are worthwhile and donate copies of his books. Maybe
this would work for a publisher also, but I doubt it. Publishers seem to
be extremely difficult to deal with.
Regarding magazines and papers, I can understand why there are none on
Bookshare. firstly, they are difficult to scan, because the articles are
often split up and placed over multiple pages. It takes a long time to
piece a magazine together and get things in proper reading order. You
might want to try scanning some yourself, and you'll see what i mean. I
had visions of scanning all sorts of cool magazines that I couldn't get from
the LOC program. But after actually trying it, I gave it up as not worth
the literally hours of time it would take to get it right. If the
publishers would just do away with the ads and put the articles in logical
reading order,
well, no problem. <smile>
OK, I didn't know that. Sorry. I guess that makes sense when I think
about it. Besides, it is nice not having the ads.
The other problem is that they go out of date quickly. A mystery magazine
such as the one you mentioned would be an exception. but the more topical
periodicals wouldn't be of much interest a few months or even
weeks after they had been scanned.
I disagree on that. There are sites, such as _The New York Times_ which
has made archives available back to 1850 or so. They charge for each
article regardless of age. It would be useful for research purposes. It
is not uncommon for people to go back even a few years to look up a certain
article.
I agree about the listings of books in the categories. I'd like to be able
to press enter on the link for a given category and see all the books come
up, newest first.
I wasn't proposing that since in some cases you would literally have
thousands of books on one page. I would just like to download a list,
similar to NLS. I can go to NLS and either get yearly catalogs or
backissues of _Braille Book Review_. I would like to be able to search for
keywords in the synopses, for example. I would like to find all _Star
Trek_ books, even though they do not mention _Star Trek_ in the title.
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