Marissa,
If you feel so strongly about page breaks, you ought to change things so
that a file downloaded from the validation page can be uploaded as an RTF
file. It's a lot easier to keep page breaks in RTF than in TXT, imho.
Even using Textpad, it can be a pain. And, really, I see no reason why a
TXT has to stay a TXT, especially if Bookshare now cares about formatting
stuff like page breaks.
Tracy
On Mon, 8 Nov 2004, Marissa Mika wrote:
Hi Folks,
After a long discussion among the folks here at Bookshare.org, we've decided that books without page breaks are pretty problematic. The lack of page breaks makes it much more difficult to navigate through the book, and we'd like to phase that out due to the fact that it really is a quality issue. That said, you'll start to see a lot of books being kicked back to the validation cue for the retrieval of these missing page breaks.
These books that have been kicked back to the validation cue are the original files as submitted by the original submitter. If these files have existing page breaks, that's terrific. You can just go back through and validate as such. If not, reject the book and ask for someone to submit a fresh scan with page breaks intact.
I realize that this is a change in policy that may be frustrating to adjust to at first. We're doing this because we want to maintain a high level of quality on our site and continue to improve our collection. This is already happening with author's names (I hope we'll move on to title clean up next) and revising the fair list. Please contact me if you have any questions. I'll be spending a fair chunk of this week revising the validation instruction packet that's emailed out to all of the new volunteers and would value your feedback.
Thanks much and happy validating,
Marissa
Bookshare.org Operations