[bookshare-discuss] Re: Do these books get read before being submitted?
- From: "Jana Jackson" <jana@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 12:50:45 -0500
Hi! Some books are read before they are submitted. Others are simply
checked. We've been asking that submitters do a more thorough spell-check,
page integrity check, etc., before submitting. This should help a submitter
to track down those garbled pages and fix them before submitting their
books. Take care!
Jana
----- Original Message -----
From: "boomerdad" <boomerdad@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, September 13, 2004 5:12 AM
Subject: [bookshare-discuss] Do these books get read before being submitted?
> 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 t
> hree-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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