Hi. First, I do have an active membership. I am blind. I will be
honest. I do the validations because I want to read the books, but also
mostly for the credit. Even though 50 cents per book isn't much, if I do
100, I get a free renewal. My goal for the year is to do 100. I don't
know how many I've already done, but even with the 15 currently on my step
2 page I don't think I'm there yet. I will do as much as I can to reach my
goal of 100.
Second, I still disagree. I do see your point about if a book sits on a
step 2 page for months, it should stay on the step 1 page instead. I don't
completely agree with it since there can be other issues involved that you
do not know about, such as page breaks needing to be repaired, but I can
see your point and will drop it.
I still very much disagree with your statement that popular books
disappearing within 24 hours is good because they get pushed through the
system faster. Jake just said that he has 19 waiting in the admin
approval. I am still waiting on the Christmas book which I purposely
hurried through so it would be approved before Christmas. I have seen
other books take three to six months sitting in the admin approval pool
before they go live. I'm sorry, but the facts speak for themselves on
this. It does little good to rush through a book hoping it will get
approved faster for others to read. The fact is that unless you want to
wait an eternity, you're better to grab it yourself from the step 1
page. I am not saying that this is the admin's fault. They probably have
a huge backlog too, and the holidays and database crash probably disrupted
them. All I am saying is that you're incorrect if you think that just
because people grab books quicker and hurry up to get them pushed through
means that others will be able to read them in a reasonable time period. I
do make a reasonable effort to move my books along and get them off the
step 2 page, but I still have quite a few that I've approved that haven't
showed up yet.
Just for the fun of it, maybe I will post a note to the list when I
validate a book. I would like someone else, in addition to me, to watch
the new books page and see when it shows up. I'm curious just how bad the
admin backlog is. I bet it will be a matter of weeks or months. There are
exceptions certainly. One Agatha Christie book made it through
surprisingly quickly, only a few days. I know of at least two Hardy Boys
books that have been waiting at least 10-14 days. Someone submitted a Mrs.
Pollifax book. That has been waiting at least a week. From this
validator's standpoint, that is the bottleneck, not how many books I have
or how long it takes me. There is no point in rushing a book off step 2 if
it takes a month, I might as well take the month myself to read it and
clean it up. Hopefully the admin backlog will straighten itself out and
things will start flowing smoother again.
My apologies to bookshare admins. I am not upset with you. I think you've
been under stress lately with the various things going on and the overall
amount of work you've had. I don't mean anything negative against you
personally. Thanks for doing a great job and getting so many books pushed
through.
At 11:25 AM 1/23/2005 -0500, you wrote:
My general point is that this practice slows down the process for those books, not for those submitters per sey.
Those books should be available for anyone to validate and if a popular book is gone within 24 hours thats great, that means it should be getting on the system faster. But if validaters without active bookshare memberships are using validation as a tool to read books then there is an issue here.
And again, how many weeks if not months will it take for you to go through 15 books?
I realize people sometimes grab books that have been sitting on step1 for months. But if they are going to sit on your step 2 for months then they might as well have stayed where they were.
my bottomline statement applies here, I just feel that some people might be bighting off more then they can chew and it slows down the process for those particular books and that is what bookshare is about, to make high-quality texts available to everyone not just whoever grabs it first.
