[bksvol-discuss] Re: Question for everyone: What makes you reject a book?
- From: Debby Franson <the.bee@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 25 Dec 2009 01:36:15 -0600
Hi Judy S.!
If I didn't find a cheap copy of "And Then There Were Two", I would have
had to reject it, because there were several pages missing here and there
and a good number of scanos. If I didn't spend a good deal of time on it,
i would have rejected it, but I like the story, so I have to find out how
it ends, since the text just stops in the middle of a page and the next
probably 5 or 6 pages to the end of the book maybe, though I don't know for
sure, are all x's down the pages in a column.
I haven't released a book yet, but I would if I found that the subject
matter bored me or if something was going on in my life that needed my
attention or sapped my energy so that I couldn't work on a book.
I haven't scanned since the new web site was in place when the volunteer
system was changed to the present form rather than just being able to
upload a scan in a proprietary file format of ARK that is the OPenBook
file format, my OCR software of choice.
Debby
At 02:02 PM 12/24/2009, Judy s. wrote
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.
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