[bookshare-discuss] Do these books get read before being submitted?
- From: "boomerdad" <boomerdad@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 03:12:31 -0700
After having some difficulty scanning Wizard and Glass by Stephen King (I think
Openbook doesn't like scanning big books when set to scan page layout elements,
but that's a whole other topic for another list), I downloaded WIG from
Bookshare and began to read. My first finding was that the entire book was
double-spaced. I was a bit irritated, but I figured well, maybe there was a
problem either in converting the book to the Bookshare format, or maybe when
Openbook loaded it as an .ark file something happened. I figured, well, I can
just manually fix this as I read. No big. Then I came up on a page that is
completely and totally garbled, beyond any ability to recognize what the text
is supposed to be. There are ^ symbols all over the place, and other oddities.
Granted, the book is over 600 pages long, and that may be the only page like
this ... I stopped reading in disgust and opted to try re-scanning this mammoth
with Openbook. I have yet to do so; that's tomorrow's three-plus-hour task.
My question is: If the person read this before submitting it, why not re-scan
the offending page(s)? And if the submitting person didn't read it before
submitting ... why submit something you haven't read yourself? It just seems
like an awfully big leap of faith to do this; I've done it twice, and both
times I was, thankfully, given the opportunity to make "corrections" in the
form of rescanning pages that had unintelligible material. Once I was able to
take advantage of the opportunity, once I wasn't ... but it taught me a very
valuable lesson, as was reinforced by my Wizard and Glass experience. Besides,
if you read something before submitting it, you get a chance to edit out the
errors of a scan and submit a near-perfect to perfect copy of your book.
It occurs to me as I write this that maybe the offending page could've been
caused by Openbook somehow, as I've encountered garbled pages like this when
scanning with Finereader from time to time. I find this unlikely, though,
since so far as I know, Openbook merely reads from the Daisy-formatted book,
and doesn't "convert" it to anything.
The only possible objection to this read-before-submitting thing that comes
readily to mind is "Well, if we did that, many fewer books would be available,"
to which I reply that while this is true, the quality of said books would be
more consistent, more likely than not, and would lead to many more satisfying
reading experiences. I submit many more books to Bookshare.org than I
personally download, mainly because I've found from my experiences that
downloading a book from Bookshare is a rather hit-and-miss experience.
I also want to hasten to add that I am not in any way flaming the individual
who submitted Wizard and Glass. As I said, I've had this happen myself to two
of my submissions, so the question is more or less hypothetical; I was merely
relating my experience, which happened to involve that particular book.
If this post has had a harsh edge to it, I assure you it's not intentional. I
am frustrated, and that has probably carried over into my writing, despite my
attempts to prevent it from doing so. I already have scanned the book twice
unsuccessfully because of the affore-mentioned page-layout problem in OpenBook,
and the idea of scanning it *again* is ... well ... frustrating. I thought
about just trying to re-scan any problematic pages ... but the Bookshare pages
and Openbook's page divisions don't line up, so I'd have to do all sorts of
cutting and pasting and deleting and ... yikes...! I think if my problem had
just been with garbled pages, I'd do it, but since I would have to delete all
those blank lines as I read the Bookshare version ... I'll try scanning it one.
more. time. with the page-layout feature turned off and hope for better
results.
If nothing else, thanks for listening to (reading) me vent. I realize
Bookshare is a voluntary program, and its existence is a wonderful thing;
that's why I've joined it, and that's why I submit books I read. I just wish
that when downloading a book to read from Bookshare, I could be more secure in
the knowledge that I won't have to worry about encountering incomprehensible
garbage that makes me guess at what occurred in passages of a book.
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