[bksvol-discuss] To Jim Fruchterman and Hope, wasPage numbers and headers/footers
- From: Pat Ferguson <fergent@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2005 10:30:11 -0500
Dear Mr. Fruchterman, Hope, and fellow BookSharians,
I know that you all are working very hard to make BookShare the most
accessible way for us to get books, I honestly believe you are doing an
excellent job, and I'm pleased with the improvements with Bookshare books.
I know that your goal is to keep the books as close to the origional format
as possible while still making them accessible to us.
I also know that page numbers, headers, chapter headings, and footers can
be very anoying when trying to read a book, however keeping them is
important to us.
I often read books with my Voice Note, and I always want to keep my place
when I have to stop reading. I also like knowing when I'm in a new chapter
in a book. I really appreciate the page numbers in the books, as that helps
with knowing where I left off, if I forget and just shut off my Voice Note,
the next time I start reading, I can search for the page number and if the
chapter numbers were there, I could search for the chapter number.
Also when converting books to MP3 files, it makes it easier to mark the
chapter headings for each MP3 file.
I agree with your comments Hope!
I believe that we're headed in the right direction with this headder/footer
and stripper stuff.
I reallyhope that we can get some fund raising going! I think that would be
wonderful! I want you to know, Jim, that I tell everyone about BookShare,
even my sighted friends.
Thank you to all the loving BookShare staff for listening to us! Keep up
the excellent work!
You are all loving!
Blessings,
Pat Ferguson forever loving BookShare
At 03:42 AM 7/25/05, you wrote:
Your objectives are good. It would also be helpful to have Chapter titles
if they are in the print books. Ideally it would be nice if the book share
books could have the exact content of the print books including chapters,
page numbers etc.
Thank you for your hard work and for the opportunity given to us to read
lots of books.
Smile
Hope
----- Original Message -----
From: <mailto:Jim@xxxxxxxxxxxx>Jim@xxxxxxxxxxxx
To: <mailto:bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, July 25, 2005 2:05 AM
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Page numbers and headers/footers
Hey, I promised my next post would be on this topic. Here it is!
Let's talk about the objectives we had in creating today's workflow:
Take a bunch of text file formats as input, and get them to RTF
Create an automated tool to turn the RTF into a single XML file
Use that single source file to create a DAISY book, and a BRF book
Capture page tags and page numbers correctly
Hopefully capture chapter tags
We weren't able to automatically get chapter tags four years ago, and
haven't been able to put much effort into it since. As many of you know,
we surveyed our users some time back and got a lot of feedback (more than
half of our users at that time responded) that improving quality was a big
deal. We've been trying to upgrade all Fair quality books, and focusing
more on high quality content. We've also moved away from accepting books
without pages, since we regard page numbers as the minimum navigation
requirement to meet basic quality standards.
Rather than getting into the deep discussion of whys and wherefores, let
me test out an ideal solution to make sure I know what people would want:
On the input side, correct print page numbering captured in all of our books
On the output side, the ability to have these print page numbers and
headers and footers accessible in either DAISY or BRF formats: people who
don't want them don't see them, and people who do want them do see them
If this worked perfectly, would people be happy? By making sure we're
clear on the ideal solution, we can go back to how we're missing and how
to get closer to the ideal than we are doing today. The timing is good,
because we're designing Bookshare.org's first overhaul, and we need to
know where we're going. We already know that we're likely to get a much
different input stream three years from now than we did in the past three
years, so the input processing workflow is definitely getting revisited.
Jim Fruchterman
President and CEO
Benetech
480 California Avenue, Suite 201
Palo Alto, California 94306 USA
+1 650 475-5440 extension 106
Fax: +1 650 475-1066
<mailto:jim@xxxxxxxxxxxx>jim@xxxxxxxxxxxx
www.benetech.org
The Benetech Initiative - Technology Serving Humanity
Benetech is a nonprofit organization
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