Too many questions here for me to want to try to answer them all, but I can answer the one about what makes me think one of my scans was unfairly rejected. There was one that was rejected with the comment that many of the words on opposing pages had scanned on the wrong page. I had read through the whole thing myself and had not seen that at all, so I just resubmitted it again without making any changes whatsoever and the same person picked it up again. This time he approved it and it entered the collection. Again, my second submission of it was the exact same file as my first submission. "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." - Susan B. Anthony
The Militant: http://www.themilitant.com Pathfinder Press: http://www.pathfinderpress.com Granma International: http://www.granma.cu/ingles/index.html----- Original Message ----- From: "Judy s." <cherryjam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Thursday, December 24, 2009 3:02 PMSubject: [bksvol-discuss] Question for everyone: What makes you reject a book?
These are just some curiosity questions for me, as of course there aren't any "right" answers. smile.I'm curious about what makes us decide, as proofreaders, to reject a book? Also, what makes us decide to release a book? And for scanners, are there any kind of circumstances that made you feel someone who was proofreading unfairly rejected your scan?For myself, I try to use the following rule of thumb: I reject a book if I think it will take more time to fix it than rescan it. That's pretty subjective, of course. For example, I'm willing to spend a lot of time working on a book that was obviously hard to scan that had problems, such as being full of tables or weird fonts that didn't scan, or almost too huge to fit on a scanner. I'm also more likely to spend extra time on a book that the scanner warned me had a specific problem that they couldn't fix and needed help with.I'm likely to rject a book that has all kinds of problems that the scanner could have spent a little time adjusting their scan to take care of that is ordinarly straightforward. On those types, I usually ask some of the experienced scanners for their opinion, too, on how hard it would have been to correct that problem while scanning, before rejecting such a book.I'm also much more likely to reject a book if it's been in the checkout list for at least six months, and I find in the history that at least three other proofreaders have checked out the book prior to me and then released it. Usually, but not always, that's a sign that there's a real problem with the scan. Often I can actually find the problem and fix it, because I've found there are visual cues to the solution that I suspect are really hard for a blind proofreader to find. However, it does make me a tad more likely to reject such a scan.As an aside, I've realized that it's much more likely for a blind proofreader to find certain scanning errors than I am. The substitution of the numeral one for a capital I for example, isn't at all obvious to me as a sighted proofreader unless I set up my fonts to one that presents capital I's as very different in appearance than ones. In most fonts, they are virtually identical in appearance!On releasing a book, I'm likely to release it right away if I find that it just isn't my cup of tea. I've also released books that need a sighted proofreader who actually needs a copy of the book in front of them. Sometimes google books or Amazon has the book in images, and I can do that. Also, some of the volunteers who scan keep their original images of the pages, and in those cases they can just email me the page images I need and I can figure out problems. Then there are books that have layouts that scanned beautifully, like tons of sidebars and tables (for example, the Dummies books) that for the life of me I can't figure out how to translate into something that makes sense easily, or that are just too hard for me to manipulate with my voice driven software.So, what makes you decide to reject a book? What makes you decide to release a book? And for you scanners, when have you felt a book was rejected when it should have been accepted? smile.Judy s. To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxxput 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.
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