[bksvol-discuss] Ten Things I've Learned From The Bookshare Chat Room

  • From: Monica Willyard <rhyami@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx,bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2007 10:37:23 -0400

Hi everyone. I've been learning so much from the Bookshare community chat room that I thought I'd post some here. Maybe someone here needs to know about these. If you want to learn enough tips and tricks to make your own ten things list, you'll find the community room at

http://tinyurl.com/2avczp

10. Library sales, books swap sites, and good will thrift stores are a great place to find affordable books to scan.

9. A chat room is a great place to teach someone how to use Bookshare and how to scan because you can ask or answer questions immediately and even hear what a person's software is telling them if they're having a hard time. We've actually helped several people learn to unpack and read books, do their first scan, and upload their first validation in the community room.

8. The Bookshare staff are friendly people and are genuinely interested in what we need and want Bookshare to become. They are responsive to requests for site improvements and want to work with us to spread the word about Bookshare to other people who qualify for the service.

7. When scanning or validating a book, keep your copy of that book until you're sure it's been approved by Bookshare. This will prevent you from having to start from scratch if your book has to be resubmitted or you have to do one small additional thing to make a validation ready for the collection.

6. The pages of books, especially paperbacks, are sometimes dirty with dust and a sort of ink residue. Fanning the pages with your fingers and gently dusting a page before scanning can give you a clearer scan.

5. Clean your scanner with a soft, lint-free cloth. Do not use water or other liquid as these can actually go inside the scanner glass and fog up your scanning surface. Wiping the glass with a soft cloth will remove ink and dust.

4. Make a special folder to hold books you're actively validating so you will always know where your files are. When you're done with a validation, move it to another folder, preferably a folder where you store completed projects.


3. Before scanning a book, use your fingers to limber up the spine of a book so it will lie flat during scans. Turn through the pages, pressing your fingers along the inside of the spine. Doing this before a scan will also help to loosen pages that are stuck together.

2. When scanning paperbacks, greyscale frequently works better than dynamic thresholding, even when Kurzweil's optimization doesn't choose that option. If your scan isn't as clear as you'd like after doing optimization, try using greyscale with your brightness set to somewhere between 60 and 70. This works so well for me that it's become my default for paperbacks.

1. We have some awesome people who are part of the Bookshare community, people with talents that I never would have guessed at by knowing them through email. Who knew that we have such a variety of people with so many exciting ideas to share about life and about Bookshare? I went to the chats expecting information about scanning and such. I found that, and I also found friendship and encouragement to be who I am and reach my goals and dreams. You can find some of what I've written here in a book or manual somewhere. You can't find the warm friendship and support there. You can find it in a community of people from very different backgrounds and beliefs... a community of people from Bookshare.

If you like any of what I've written here, please take a few minutes and drop by. In fact, there are people in the room throughout the day and evening, and we're having a question and answer time with Steve from the Kurzweil staff tonight at 8 P.M. Eastern. To find the community room, just visit http://tinyurl.com/2avczp



Monica Willyard, rhyami@xxxxxxxxx

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