I think it's a great idea overall, but some children's books do not have page numbers in them. You'll need to make a decision as to how to handle those. They're generally much shorter, so it really wouldn't be that much work for a person to just, say, put the number 1 on the first page where text begins and go on from there. But you'll have to state that explicitly if you want all books to have 90 percent of page numbers, or else make an exception for children's books or any other books that might come along that lack page numbers.
Evan Evan----- Original Message ----- From: "Pavi Mehta" <pavim@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Monica Willyard" <rhyami@xxxxxxxxx>; <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>Cc: "Bookshare.org Volunteers" <Volunteers@xxxxxxxxxxxx>; <support@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 5:50 PM Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Books Without Page Numbers
Hi Monica, Thanks for this thoughtful email. We've actually had extensive conversations among the staff regarding page numbers recently. While it is true that we have not required them officially, we are looking to change policy on that shortly. We will be making the announcement soon to the volunteer community that a book submitted to Bookshare must have page numbers on at least 90% of its pages in order to be accepted. We will make the necessary edits to the volunteer manual as well to reflect this. Our reasoning is that fulfilling this requirement helps ensure that readers are able to navigate books with greater ease and those who are students and working on assignments can better keep up with class reading. (And as you rightly pointed out it makes missing or duplicate pages much easier to spot for both proofreader as well as admin approving the books). In terms of approaching Kurzweil for a page number protector, I've ccd our support team on this email to see if they have any input on that. In the meantime, if you have any further feedback on the issue of page numbering or on our intended approach to it, please let us know. It is great to be refining our policies in this way, and though it may entail some initial ruffling of feathers I am sure the end result will be higher quality books for everyone. All good things, Pavi -----Original Message----- From: Monica Willyard [mailto:rhyami@xxxxxxxxx] Sent: Sunday, April 19, 2009 6:57 PM To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Cc: Bookshare.org Volunteers Subject: Books Without Page Numbers I know of something that is being done that's stripping page numbers and sometimes chapter headings from submitted books as well. Some volunteers, mostly not on the list, have begun using Kurzweil's feature to strip headers automatically. While it does remove the annoying header at the top of the page, it also removes the page numbers as well. I don't think this is being done with any malice or any realization of how difficult proofreading these books can be. It just seems like a handy shortcut. The text of the books is clean and easy to read. Right now, Bookshare still hasn't officially required page numbers, so it's a touchy subject. I have politely asked two volunteers to use another method and was told that page numbers are annoying and that the people don't want to hear them while reading. In both cases, there were missing pages, and I had to go and buy the novel because there was no way to get these people to scan the pages I needed since their print page numbers and my number of page breaks didn't agree. This is a very gray area for me. The only solution I've thought of is to put in numbers by hand, but that's a guessing game since there's not a good way to tell what the page number is for the first page of core content. It may be page 1 in some books but is different in other books. It's usually page 7 in the Harlequin and Steeplehill romances and page 5 in the Berkley Prime Crime series. Without official backing from Bookshare, I don't feel comfortable with either rejecting a book with clear text with no page numbers or continuing to ask that the submitter stop using the Kurzweil header feature. I'm a literalist when it comes to Bookshare's instructions, and the manual is pretty clear about page breaks being required but page numbers being optional. This is because some books do not come with page numbers, and I respect that. The manual does ask proofreaders not to remove page numbers if present, but it doesn't give any direct guidelines for proofreaders about handling books with the page numbers stripped. It also does not strongly advise submitters to refrain from using automatic stripping tools that remove page numbers. I don't think it's right for me to hold a person to a higher standard than what is required by Bookshare. I don't like the situation though. It makes it much harder to spot missing pages, duplicate pages, and unnumbered pages containing ads or photos in the center of a book. I know this causes confusion for Carrie as well since she can't spot missing pages either. Hmm. Since they're writing a new version of Kurzweil, maybe we would have better luck with asking them to write a page number protector so that people could strip headers without losing page numbers. Is anyone on the Kurzweil list or know of someone to approach at Kurzweil where that feature could be requested? Or maybe they could add a "number pages sequentially" feature where you could mark page 1, and the program could insert actual page numbers just after each page break until the end of the file. It would take the define operator page numbers feature a step further and could be a separate menu item so the define operator page number feature would still work as usual. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would make life easier when you have to manually number a 500 page book. What do you all think? Is it worth asking? Monica Willyard "The best way to predict the future is to create it." -- Peter Drucker -----Original Message----- From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of E. Sent: Sunday, April 19, 2009 2:03 AM To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [bksvol-discuss] request to submitters I have recently validated several books all of which had lots of junk characters, no page numbers whatsoever or both. If submitters are doing something which removes page numbers along with running headers and footers please do you best to find out how to retain the page numbers. Also please watch out for the following junk characters. For some reason I am finding more of them in submits lately. You need punctuation turned on to read the next few junk character examples. They are ~ ^ tab character * | \ I know it seems these characters can easily be removed. Sometimes what seems easy is harder than you think in reality so if you can prevent them from getting into your submits please help out. You may want to use rank spelling on a page or two of text to find out how it is scanning. Thanks for being understanding. Elizabeth To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. 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