[bksvol-discuss] Re: DAISY navigation in publisher quality books
- From: Gmail For Deb <djoutland@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2014 17:08:52 -0400
Hi, Judy,
I think you are exactly right! The lack of a standard way of navigating ebooks
is widespread! I first noticed this when I was gathering information to lead a
study group where I had the electronic form, and most participants had paper
copies. You just can't cite from the ebook, and find it in the paper one!
That makes using such books frustrating at least, and virtually useless at
worst if you need specific source citations!
Clearly, a standard of some kind needs to be developed and USED CONSISTENTLY,
otherwise, the electronic navigation of books is going to be a mess forever,
for everyone, sighted or not! And every day, the pile of books with "bad"
navigation grows higher and higher!
Deb Outland
Lexington, Kentucky
> On Sep 3, 2014, at 4:06 PM, "Judy s." <cherryjam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Just some observations on the missing or poor DAISY navigation in publisher
> quality books. As a sighted, but disabled, reader, one of the things I hate
> about the evolution of the ebook format for sighted readers for platforms
> like the Kindle is that publishers have decided that page numbers, page
> breaks and even in many cases clearly delineated chapter headings are a thing
> of the past. The publisher quality books we're getting as members here on
> Bookshare aren't worse in terms of navigation than the ones sighted readers
> get when using a kindle or a nook. Instead, they are equally awful.
>
> Part of it is of course that a physical page in a printed book is itself an
> artifact of the limitations and demands of the physical printing of a book,
> and the shelf space it takes, the optimal size of a book for holding and
> reading, the book's purpose and all sorts of other factors. None of those
> translate into the needs of presenting a book on an electronic screen. And
> part of it is a learning curve, as the ebook industry feels its way into how
> to make ebooks work. There still isn't any industry standard for how an ebook
> should look on a screen or navigate or all kinds of other factors that affect
> the final product that the consumer (or in our case the disabled reader) gets.
>
> As a member, it's very frustrating to have books with poor or no navigation,
> no page numbers and the like. However, I just don't see that Bookshare has a
> whole lot of say in what comes in terms of what's in a book for navigation
> from the publishers because of the above. Bookshare certainly doesn't have
> the funding or the staff to turn around and put all those things into the
> hundreds of thousands of books that have come in.
>
> I'm not making excuses for the publishers or Bookshare here. I'm just sharing
> my observations.
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