[bookshare-discuss] Re: Do these books get read before being submitted?
- From: Brenda Mueller <brendin@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 19:47:07 -0400
My impression is that I, as an individual subscriber can download 20 books a
month. When I'm working, that's not going to happen, but when I'm home, snowed
in with the power out, boy, can I read. Voice note works on batteries. When
the power is out, I turn to Bookshare.
Brenda Mueller
> ----- Original Message -----
>From: Cindy <popularplace@xxxxxxxxx
>To: bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 15:32:58 -0700 (PDT)
>Subject: [bookshare-discuss] Re: Do these books get read before being
>submitted?
>Julie,
>Hopefully you read my reply to boomerdad, but in case
>not -- be sure to notify Jesse that the book is
>unreadable all the way through.
>BTW, Jesse -- when a member downloads a book from the
>collection that he/she can't enjoy, do they get a
>credit for the book, so it doesn't count against their
>limit of 50 (or whatever?)
>Cindy
>--- "J.M." <inlovewithchrist@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> I can relate to this. Last night, I was reading one
>> of the Left Behind
>> books. I was over halfway done with the book when I
>> encountered pure junk.
>> Nothing made sense. I kept scrolling through, trying
>> to find where I left
>> off or at least somewhere where the text started
>> making sense, but no luck.
>> I was so frustrated! It irritates me when you get
>> into a book and not
>> realize it has some junk pages until you've already
>> gotten into it. I guess
>> I'll be downloading this copy from Web braille, as I
>> know they have the
>> whole series, but it is frustrating. Take care.
>> Julie Morales
>> Email and Windows/MSN Messenger:
>> inlovewithchrist@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> When God puts a tear in your eye, it is because He
>> wants to put a rainbow in
>> your heart.
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "boomerdad" <boomerdad@xxxxxxxxxxxx
>> To: <bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> Sent: Monday, September 13, 2004 3:12 AM
>> Subject: [bookshare-discuss] Do these books get read
>> before being submitted?
>> After having some difficulty scanning Wizard and
>> Glass by Stephen King (I
>> think Openbook doesn't like scanning big books when
>> set to scan page layout
>> elements, but that's a whole other topic for another
>> list), I downloaded WIG
>> from Bookshare and began to read. My first finding
>> was that the entire book
>> was double-spaced. I was a bit irritated, but I
>> figured well, maybe there
>> was a problem either in converting the book to the
>> Bookshare format, or
>> maybe when Openbook loaded it as an .ark file
>> something happened. I
>> figured, well, I can just manually fix this as I
>> read. No big. Then I came
>> up on a page that is completely and totally garbled,
>> beyond any ability to
>> recognize what the text is supposed to be. There
>> are ^ symbols all over the
>> place, and other oddities. Granted, the book is
>> over 600 pages long, and
>> that may be the only page like this ... I stopped
>> reading in disgust and
>> opted to try re-scanning this mammoth with Openbook.
>> I have yet to do so;
>> that's tomorrow's t
>> hree-plus-hour task. My question is: If the person
>> read this before
>> submitting it, why not re-scan the offending
>> page(s)? And if the submitting
>> person didn't read it before submitting ... why
>> submit something you haven't
>> read yourself? It just seems like an awfully big
>> leap of faith to do this;
>> I've done it twice, and both times I was,
>> thankfully, given the opportunity
>> to make "corrections" in the form of rescanning
>> pages that had
>> unintelligible material. Once I was able to take
>> advantage of the
>> opportunity, once I wasn't ... but it taught me a
>> very valuable lesson, as
>> was reinforced by my Wizard and Glass experience.
>> Besides, if you read
>> something before submitting it, you get a chance to
>> edit out the errors of a
>> scan and submit a near-perfect to perfect copy of
>> your book.
>> It occurs to me as I write this that maybe the
>> offending page could've been
>> caused by Openbook somehow, as I've encountered
>> garbled pages like this when
>> scanning with Finereader from time to time. I find
>> this unlikely, though,
>> since so far as I know, Openbook merely reads from
>> the Daisy-formatted book,
>> and doesn't "convert" it to anything.
>> The only possible objection to this
>> read-before-submitting thing that comes
>> readily to mind is "Well, if we did that, many fewer
>> books would be
>> available," to which I reply that while this is
>> true, the quality of said
>> books would be more consistent, more likely than
>> not, and would lead to many
>> more satisfying reading experiences. I submit many
>> more books to
>> Bookshare.org than I personally download, mainly
>> because I've found from my
>> experiences that downloading a book from Bookshare
>> is a rather hit-and-miss
>> experience.
>> I also want to hasten to add that I am not in any
>> way flaming the individual
>> who submitted Wizard and Glass. As I said, I've had
>> this happen myself to
>> two of my submissions, so the question is more or
>> less hypothetical; I was
>> merely relating my experience, which happened to
>> involve that particular
>> book.
>> If this post has had a harsh edge to it, I assure
>> you it's not intentional.
>> I am frustrated, and that has probably carried over
>> into my writing, despite
>> my attempts to prevent it from doing so. I already
>> have scanned the book
>> twice unsuccessfully because of the affore-mentioned
>> page-layout problem in
>> OpenBook, and the idea of scanning it *again* is ...
>> well ... frustrating.
>> I thought about just trying to re-scan any
>> problematic pages ... but the
>> Bookshare pages and Openbook's page divisions don't
>> line up, so I'd have to
>> do all sorts of cutting and pasting and deleting and
>> ... yikes...! I think
>> if my problem had just been with garbled pages, I'd
>> do it, but since I would
>> have to delete all those blank lines as I read the
>> Bookshare version ...
>> I'll try scanning it one. more. time. with the
>> page-layout feature turned
>> off and hope for better results.
>> If nothing else, thanks for listening to (reading)
>> me vent. I realize
>> Bookshare is a voluntary program, and its existence
>> is a wonderful thing;
>> that's why I've joined it, and that's why I submit
>> books I read. I just
>> wish that when downloading a book to read from
>> Bookshare, I could be more
>> secure in the knowledge that I won't have to worry
>> about encountering
>> incomprehensible garbage that makes me guess at what
>> occurred in passages of
>> a book.
>__________________________________________________
>Do You Yahoo!?
>Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
>http://mail.yahoo.com
Other related posts:
