Hello,
Well, I wasn't sure how to answer you, but you made a reference
in a later posting to "new books." So I went there to
investigate, and, "thousands of technical books", indeed! No
wonder you're frustrated. I don't mean to ask the obvious, but
since I can't know just from what you've said: is this where
you've been looking all of your time with Bookshare, and if so,
did there used to be a lot more (or even mostly) fiction? That
would be quite a contrast to what I found there. (I'm often
curious as to how a lot of these very specific books dealing with
science, medicine or engineering would translate or even be
displayed in a straightforward way for a non-sighted readership;
but I read Braille exclusively, in the BRF format, so I guess
some of the DAISY books, essecially with images or text, would
get around some of this.)
Anyway: I have a suggestion, and if you're already familiar with
this, then I'm out of ideas. You probably know that the
Bookshare homepage has a "Browse" link which, among other
options, lets you do so "by subject category", and there are 48
of them. The "Literature and Fiction" alone has something like
210,000 titles, and there are other "sub-genres" besides (Horror,
Humor, Romance, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Westerns.) There
might be more. Within any one of those: it will of course give
you a large list starting with results "1 through 25." You can
customize your search with up to 100 results per page but, maybe
more helpful for you, you can also choose the list option "by
date added." All results will then go from the oldest to newest.
If you then "go to last page", and save that page as a favorite,
you can always come back to it directly to find the newest
results in whatever category you've chosen, and they will just be
added to automatically as more books come in. There's still a
lot to wade through, but at least it narrows the search. (It's
interesting how people's preferences are so different. John, who
first answered you, almost never uses this service for fiction,
while it's almost all I look for and, as someone said, "there's
more than I could read in ten lifetimes." And because I'm so
Braille-oriented, I seldom use BARD unless it's an audiobook by a
writer I really like that I can't read any other way-I don't like
much of their Braille and I really dislike UEB, although I can
read it if I must.) Also: the Fiction category I follow lately
has what strikes me as way too many titles involving vampires,
werewolves, zombies, etc. They don't offend me, just don't
interest me, but I've been having what sounds like the same
reaction you were to all the nonfiction: "what, more of this?"
Like so much in life, this is all relative.
So, I hope that helps. If you need to know more specifics, let
me know.
Andy
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