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