[bksvol-discuss] Re: Does Internet Archive provide e-books?
- From: "John J. Boyer" <john.boyer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2012 12:46:28 -0500
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
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.
Other related posts:
