Marry, I'd like to suggest that the standards that Jesse outlines are mainly suggested by "perceived" business reasons. Many of us don't agree with these standards but it seems as if Bookshare has chosen to use the number of books as a marketting tool. While I can understand this reason, it is difficult for those of us who see quality of books a key factor in having this service. Pratik Pratik Patel Managing Director CUNYAssistive Technology Services The City University of New York ppatel@xxxxxx -----Original Message----- From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Mary Otten Sent: Friday, August 13, 2004 8:03 PM To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Requirements for acceptance -- the bottom line Ah yes. the notion of what is readable is the rub in all of this. Richard, I love your idea about the volunteers and validating. But getting back to the idea of readable, consider, if you will, what would happen to you if you turned in a term paper, let's not even discuss a thesis or disertation, just a garden variety term paper, and that paper had a bunch of cross-outs, scribblings, maybe a few coffee stains obscuring some of the text. What are the chances, do you suppose, that you would get anything but an F on that messy paper, 95 or even 98 percent of which might be perfectly readable? Why the heck should people pay for anything less than the high end of "good" quality? Why shouldn't we as submitters of materials take enough pride in what we submit to want to make it truly readable, i.e. containing some errors, but not so many that the meaning of entire passages is garbled? Obviously, if you have an old book with a bad font that just won't ocr well, there's not a lot you can do. I've got such a book that I keep trying, hoping that the next iteration of K1k will unlock the key to the crummy Soviet-era font and paper on which the book was printed, so that I can actually enjoy reading the book myself and have a decent enough scan to post for anybody else crazy enough to want to read this particular volume. <smile> Somebody posted a question asking about how the standards were decided upon, or words to that effect. I too would be interested in that, and would like to know if there is anything that we can do to revisit the issue and get them raised. The word "readable" means very different things to different people, it would seem. Otherwise, we wouldn't have titles on the system with portions that are totally garbled and not at all readable. Mary