[bksvol-discuss] Re: bottlenecks in submitting and validating
- From: Mike Pietruk <pietruk@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2005 07:56:50 -0400 (EDT)
Elizabeth
Anytime a service relies heavily on volunteers, the quality of output will
be somewhat inconsistent.
Add to the pot that these volunteers prepare materials on their own, often
for themselves, brings about complications.
Add to this that customers use all sorts of ways to read the end product
brings yet more complications.
Add to this that BookShare itself often destroys carefully prepared
materials by its automated processing. Add to this that BookShare
engineers actually believe that page numbering is the only issue.
Add to this that Bookshare engineers still don't get it that their books
are read on all sorts of devices and with all sorts of software, not just
daisy players and Braille devices.
Until subscribers are able to get their hands in some way on books that
are not arbitrarily massaged by mindless tools who have no idea what
happens to be important in a given book, we're playing with half a deck as
both submitters and validators.
Braille device readers may want one thing; those Daisy player listeners
another; someone using K1000 or Open Book yet another; et al.
Given everything, it is absolutely amazing that the quality of the
collection is as good as it is.
BookShare users, given the nature of the service, have to realize that
inconsistencies are a way of life. The biggest improvement would be to
give BookShare users the option of reading books as validated and/or
submitted as those are the only 2 parties that can potentially make
judgments about the presentation; an automated tool following
preprogrammed algorithms just cannot in all instances,
and giving customers the ability to see a raw file would allow them the
ability to uncover what might be missing.
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