Hi Roger, Thanks for the information. Now I have a question. I don't have a NLS reader, since I am deaf-blind. How could I get a NLS key? Once I have one, I can try to make it work with the software that Abilitiessoft develops, so I could get braille copies. John On Sun, Apr 15, 2012 at 12:46:39PM -0400, Roger Loran Bailey wrote: > All of the Internet Archive's ebooks can be more efficiently found at > OpenLibrary.org. That is an Internet Archive project and its stated goal > is to establish a web page for every book that has ever been published. > It is mainly a catalog and most pages will only contain bibliographic > data, but there are also a large number of ebooks available that they > have scanned. They have all the Project Gutenberg books and those are > public domain and can be downloaded by anyone. This does not mean that > you should give up Project Gutenberg, though, because they do not have > Gutenberg's public domain magazines. Open Library does have a lot of > books that are in copyright that can be downloaded too. There is no need > to register or to provide proof of disability because the books can only > be read on a device with an NLS key. They just assume that if you have > such a key then you must be qualified. To find these books, go to the > site and enter the search phrase "accessible book." Be sure to use the > quotation marks because if you don't you will get books that just have > those two words somewhere on their catalog pages. You will get several > million results returned and most of them are not in English. The first > page of results will consist of 100 titles. Go to the bottom of that > page and you will find any number of possible refinements for your > search. One of them will be English. If you refine your search to > English you should get over 600,000 results. You can keep going to the > bottom of the result pages to further refine your results or you may > enter search terms in addition to "accessible book" to find what you are > looking for. Once you download and start reading a book you will find > that these accessible books are raw scans and could really use the > services of Bookshare volunteers to be proofread. They are not awful > scans though. I have yet to download an Open Library book that was > unreadable. I can't say the same about Bookshare fair quality books. > Nevertheless, Open Library has a lot more books in accessible format > than Bookshare does and the collection is growing. Just last night there > was a feature on, I think it was CBS news about the Internet Archive. > They were interviewing the man who is behind it. He has a warehouse in > the San Francisco area in which he is trying to collect at least one > physical copy of every book ever published. He receives donations from > libraries when they discard books. Every book he gets is scanned and > added to the Internet Archive and so to Open Library too. Collecting > every book that has ever been published has to be a really long term > project, but it is impressive to see how much progress has been made. > > On 4/15/2012 4:44 AM, John J. Boyer wrote: > >You may have heard of this organization. I went to their website, > >http://www.archive.org , but I couldn't tell if they provided usa ble > >e-books. Fromm what I have heard, they scan books and keep an immage of > >each page. I don't knnow if these images can be used for OCR. There is > >also the matter off copyright. I don't think they can provide books > >except those in the public domain. I've been asked about them, so any > >information would be appreciated. > > > >John > > > To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to > bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx > put the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list of > available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line. -- John J. Boyer; President, Chief Software Developer Abilitiessoft, Inc. http://www.abilitiessoft.com Madison, Wisconsin USA Developing software for people with disabilities