Julie, If you think that the book should be rescanned, email booksharescans@xxxxxxx so that Rui will put it on his list of books to be rescanned. ----- Original Message ----- From: "J.M." <inlovewithchrist@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: <bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Monday, September 13, 2004 5:54 PM Subject: [bookshare-discuss] Re: Do these books get read before being submitted? > I can relate to this. Last night, I was reading one of the Left Behind > books. I was over halfway done with the book when I encountered pure junk. > Nothing made sense. I kept scrolling through, trying to find where I left > off or at least somewhere where the text started making sense, but no luck. > I was so frustrated! It irritates me when you get into a book and not > realize it has some junk pages until you've already gotten into it. I guess > I'll be downloading this copy from Web braille, as I know they have the > whole series, but it is frustrating. Take care. > Julie Morales > Email and Windows/MSN Messenger: > inlovewithchrist@xxxxxxxxxxxxx > When God puts a tear in your eye, it is because He wants to put a rainbow in > your heart. > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "boomerdad" <boomerdad@xxxxxxxxxxxx> > To: <bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> > Sent: Monday, September 13, 2004 3:12 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. > > > >