There were no ebooks when I became blind, but as a formerly sighted reader I try to imagine a book that is one long page and it seems rather unwieldy to me. So, I think that it might be well to point out to the publishers that if they were to make their ebooks more accessible to the blind then those books would be more accessible to sighted people too.
On 1/23/2015 5:03 PM, Madeleine Linares wrote:
Hi Sue,Great question—it’s an ongoing problem that we’re facing. The publisher books come into the collection in a slightly different way than books done by staff, vendors, and volunteers, so they don’t go through the same conversion process. We’re trying to raise that awareness with the publishers themselves to help them learn how to produce books that are accessible from the get-go, but it’s going to take some time.Best, Madeleine*From:*bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> [mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] *On Behalf Of *Sue Stevens*Sent:* Thursday, January 22, 2015 11:50 AM *To:* bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> *Subject:* [bksvol-discuss] Re: Page numbers Madeleine,Nothing can be done about this, but I can’t help but wonder how members that are in book clubs, or students who are told to turn to page 20, for example, cope with PQ books that have no page numbers. Evidently the converter doesn’t put them in PQ books. Of course I read BRF files. Maybe they are in DAISY files?Sue S. *From:*Madeleine Linares <mailto:Madeleinel@xxxxxxxxxxxx> *Sent:*Thursday, January 22, 2015 1:33 PM *To:*bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> *Subject:*[bksvol-discuss] Page numbers Hi everyone,Larry’s question has brought up additional questions and comments about page numbers in Bookshare books. Since we’ve been doing some testing with the converter I’ve actually learned a few things about page numbers myself and wanted to make sure everyone else knew too:Our converter automatically adds in page numbers if they aren’t there. This is why it’s really important to keep page numbers exactly as they are in the original book, and why we require a number on each page. This is also why we have volunteers back-number the pages with roman numerals if the front matter of the book has more pages before page 1.Thus, our converter should add in page numbers to Larry’s book, but now the author/publisher can see that it was not the volunteer doing so of his own accord (thus the note in brackets at the beginning of the book).Therefore, if you were to skip the page numbering and allow the converter to do it for you, we could run into all kinds of problems! For example: the table of contents likely wouldn’t match the page numbers in the book, and if a member was reading the book with someone else or in a classroom setting, they couldn’t easily find the same page!I hope this clarifies our policies. Please let me know if you have any questions!Best, Madeleine Linares Volunteer Coordinator Bookshare, a Benetech Initiative 650-644-3459 volunteer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:volunteer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
