Hi William,
Personally, I read what I scan cover to cover, word for word and fix everything
I can. I’m blind, so I leave most of the formatting stuff for the proofreader
but clean up the rtf file for text stuff as best I can. I also think it’s
likely easier for people to proof with the book, especially in my case as I’m
stuck for technical reasons with scanning in one-page mode, so the breaks are
usually messed up.
For this reason, I always send a copy of the book to the proofreader if they
can’t easily find it at a library. For example, Cindy is working on a Margery
Allingham book that has probably a zillion editions by this point, but it was
just easier for me to just send her my copy and then she can put in the breaks
where they belong.
After talking with proofers, and everyone’s preference may be different, but
they’ve asked me to leave in headers such as titles and the name of the book
(either at the top or bottom of the page). This, too, helps with making sure
the breaks are in the right place.
Hope this helps answer some of your questions. Others may have different
preferences and/or criteria. I’m just giving you what I do.
Mostly, I only scan what I want to read, so reading the books carefully to fix
things isn’t a big deal. I also have a Braille display, so editing the text
once it’s in an RTF file is easier for me. I had to work with speech only while
I waiting for a new battery for my display, and it was a bit more painstaking
to find the exact right spot.
--Katherine
From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of William Korn
(Redacted sender "willythekorn" for DMARC)
Sent: Saturday, November 07, 2015 4:29 PM
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Some Newbie Questions
I'm about halfway through scanning my first book to submit to Bookshare. I've
studied such instructions as there are on the website (and even tried to link
to the Sanncer FAQ, but that link seems to be dead.)
Although I understand that the scanner is not to proofread the book, I took the
liberty of proofing the first 40 pages, more to see how well the scanner and
the OCR software were functioning than anything else. It's functioning pretty
well, I guess. I found about a dozen "scannos" (which I also took the liberty
to correct). Most of them were either incorrect letters produced from two
other letters, or problems with the software interpreting the "1" in a page
number as an "I", others were words broken across a line in the book, but not
in the resulting .RTF file (yet still including the dash)..
In the guidelines the scanner is asked to review the .RTF file for "minimal
scannos", which leads to three questions:
1) How is "minimal" defined? Are the scannos I found above "minimal"?
2) Should I correct those scannos before uploading?
3) How is reviewing for scannos different than proofreading? They weren't
obvious things like junk characters. I would not have found them unless I read
the .RTF file.
My other major question is, how do proofers proofread the book without having
the book itself in hand? This particular edition of the book was printed in
1973 (the original copyright was 1934) and is long out of print. Subsequent
editions have been printed since then by other publishers.
William Korn
