[macvoiceover] Re: main menu comments about mac and bookshare

Ah Bookshare, don't get me started, alright you have...The issues with Bookshare and their "DAISY" files is long and complex.
The DAISY specifications provide for text only books, as opposed to books this are recorded. So you can have book with just recordings, you can have books with recording synced to text or you can have books with no recording and just the text. Bookshare uses the last of these to keep the size of the book down. The trouble is this means you can not play the book in devices like the VictorReader Classic as it has no internal voice to read the text.
So you have to have a DAISY playback device that reads the text of the book to you such as a software player or a VictorReader Stream. Or you need to transform the Bookshare's XML file of the book to a full text full audio book. My DTBmaker program will do this and in theory so would the DAISY Pipeline program. I say in theory because Bookshare doesn't give you a real dtbook XML file with their books. They give you some one off undocumented thing called <dtbook3> which will not validate in the DAISY Pipeline. I'm keep thinking of writing a program that will fix their files to be valid dtbook XML but they have so many errors in them that it would be nearly impossible to do so. The reason I have not till now is that every time I have released a program that does stuff to Bookshare file sets they go nut on me and call up all upset about it. They are not real happy about DTBmaker's ability to transform their books as it is.
So the problem come down to the lack of DAISY playback software for the Mac. When we get a full DAISY playback software done we should be able to play these books in DAISY format. Which will give us all the advantages of DAISY such as bookmarking. In the meantime you can read Bookshre in the browser by choosing to have the Bookshare unpacking tool save an HTML version of the title.
I would like to know why Bookshare insists on releasing dtbook XML file which are not valid and will not validate under the Pipeline's validator. I will give them credit for not claiming them to be true dtbook file. I wish I could say the same for NIMAC files which make that claim and then are not as well. But the fact is that Bookshare book are NOT valid DAISY books as they have their text in non-dtbook format. If you don't pass the DAISY Pipeline dtbook validator your not dtbook files it is as simple, or complex, as that. 

Greg Kearney
535 S. Jackson St.
Casper, Wyoming 82601
307-224-4022
gkearney@xxxxxxxxx

On Feb 28, 2008, at 10:35 PM, Cheryl Homiak wrote:
Actually, bookshare can be used just fine in Mac and linux; bookshare just doesn't seem to be really asware of that. In all fairness, I don't think it was Darrel that made the comments; it was the Benitek spokesman; memory fails me as to who that was. I didn't ind that he didn't know everything; it was the tone of voice and the comment about voicover being kind of a screenreader and sort of working with the Mac; gives people who might be thinking about the Mac the impression that they are out of luck as far as bookshare. Whether brining this to anybody's attention would do any good I really don't know; I just wanted people to be aware of what was said in case you get asked questions or comments are made about it. 



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