[bksvol-discuss] Re: Word on Page Breaks from Jim Fruchterman

  • From: "Lisa Belville" <hunter123@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 23:56:18 -0500

Word on Page Breaks from Jim FruchtermanHi, Brian.  I think more people can 
access the RTF files, so your submissions might get validated faster.  But 
Openbook does seem to keep page breaks, at least it does with the version 6.01 
that I have.

Lisa



  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Brian Miller 
  To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
  Sent: Friday, January 07, 2005 11:31 PM
  Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Word on Page Breaks from Jim Fruchterman


  Does anyone know if converting an arkenstone file to RTF loses the page 
breaks?
  Should I upload as an ark file, or convert them to RTF?
  Brian Miller

    ----- Original Message ----- 
    From: Marissa Mika 
    To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
    Sent: Friday, January 07, 2005 11:10 AM
    Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Word on Page Breaks from Jim Fruchterman


    Happy New Year, everybody!  Jim Fruchterman writing here.

    I wanted to weigh in on the page break issue, since I've read some of the 
messages flying around and want to make sure folks know how seriously we take 
the input.

    First of all, many of you know that we did a big survey of our users.  One 
of the major points we heard was to make a priority of improving the quality of 
our books.  The two key aspects of quality are text accuracy and navigation.  A 
great thing about our volunteer team has been the dedication to quality, and 
this has been important to customer satisfaction.  For example, you probably 
are aware that there is an effort to upgrade the quality of all the "Fair" 
quality books in our collection to Good or Excellent.  Thanks to you, we just 
surpassed 20,000 books live on Bookshare!

    Right now, the main navigation element in our books are pages, beyond words 
and paragraphs.  Pages that have no page breaks are a problem, especially for 
the novice users we are increasingly trying to serve.  I have seen the 
confusion on the faces on students and teachers when we open a book with no 
pages.  So, we want to make sure that page breaks are part of the books we add 
to Bookshare.org.  This is a priority for our broad base of users, and is 
important for responding to their quality needs.  It's also critical in our 
support of the DAISY standard, since navigation capabilities are one of the 
main benefits of DAISY.

    When I agreed to the policy change to reject "one page books," it was 
because I understood that we were getting very few of them submitted.  Almost 
all of our volunteers are submitting books that are fine.  I also understood we 
were working with volunteers who were submitting books without page breaks to 
make sure they weren't lost in the post-OCR process.  So, we didn't think this 
would be a big deal.  I'm sorry if it seems like we weren't approaching this in 
a caring, Benetech-style way.  It certainly is our intent to do this nicely 
(although the automated email process could use some tweaking, I'm sure!).  

    To ensure that this policy decision works for you and to enhance the 
navigability of our books and to improve our standards, Bookshare will no 
longer accept "one page books" after the end of March 2005. We're hoping that 
this will give our volunteers enough time to adjust to this new standard and 
publish the hard work of our submitters and validators who have submitted books 
recently that lack page breaks. 

    Scanned books come in without page breaks for two reasons:

    1.  They get dropped by accident during the post-OCR processing.  The OCR 
packages put the page breaks into scanned books by default. Some editors will 
drop these page breaks.   

    2.  They were done long ago and have no page breaks because they were 
edited out at the time.

    The first one is the important one.  Our engineering team is working with 
the Bookshare.org ops team to figure out how page breaks get lost and how to 
avoid that.  We'll draft some FAQs on page breaks to explain how to keep them 
in different editor scenarios.  We think that this should be pretty easy to 
figure out and avoid losing the page breaks.  

    The old books that don't have them are too much work to re-enter them by 
hand.  We have a process for adding page breaks back in after a fixed number of 
lines, but it is not the ideal process.  We would rather have these books in 
the collection than not have them, but we'd like to minimize this as much as 
possible.  

    Thanks for working with us to make Bookshare.org as good as it can be.



    Jim Fruchterman
    President & CEO
    Benetech 

    480 California Ave, Suite 201
    Palo Alto, CA 94306   USA
    (650) 475-5440 x-106

    Fax: (650) 475-1066
    jim@xxxxxxxxxxxx
    www.benetech.org 

    The Benetech Initiative - Technology Serving Humanity
    A nonprofit organization


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