[bksvol-discuss] FW: [scheherazade] From Nan: Is reading important to you?
- From: "Nan Hawthorne" <hathorn@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Bksvol-Discuss" <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2007 14:06:45 -0700
I just sent this to all my friends and family. I hope it works and
Bookshare gets more validators.
Nan
-----Original Message-----
Dear friends and family,
If you know me, you know books and reading are
important to me and share the feeling.
I have started volunteering for a group called
Bookshare.org whose mission is to turn print books into
text using scanners and text conversion software. They
do this for people who are blind or otherwise cannot
read print.
This is, in many ways, a better solution than tape
recording books. Why? Because text format books can
be read no matter what medium a print impaired person
uses: screen magnification on a computer, a talking
computer, printing in large print, even a refreshable
Braille display. Plus being a simple download for
anyone who is eligible for these materials, the access
is immediate.. no waiting on an interminable waiting
list for a book to be mailed to you by the library for
the blind.
What Bookshare needs now more than anything are
volunteers who can read through books that have already
been scanned to make sure the result is faithful to the
original. You won't need to buy anything or pay
anything. You just download the book, read it, then
send it back with whatever corrections were needed.
You get to read all the books you want and do a good
thing at the same time.
It's a relatively young organization.. maybe ten years
at most. And they are into collection development.
They do have a lot of books already scanned and just
waiting to be checked, or "validated", before they can
be released for use.
One thing I most value about these text format books is
that they can be searched. I do a lot of reading about
Anglo Saxon England, and not everything in an audio
book is relevant to my research. But I can't sxearch
an audio book. So I have to read from cover to cover.
I know you consider reading one of the most important
things in your life. If you volunteer for Bookshare as
a validate, which is what this task is called, you will
get to read as you make it possible for others who want
to but can't.
If you are sighted they will ask you to write a short
essay. They do this becuase in order to be able to use
the copyrighted material, they must restrict use to
those who need it. They need to make sure a sighted
volunteer really wants to help and not just get free
books.
I hope you will take a look at www.bookshare.org and
decide to volunteer, just as I did. I wrote this
entire message at my own initiative because reading and
volunteering are, as you well know, terribly important
to me.
Your friend,
Nan Hawthorne
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