Jill, I take your point, and I admire you for being willing to put
that much time into what you do. I mean that sincerely and not as a
cliche. I even agree with you that the ideal thing is to have people
who like reading a book do the scanning and validation because
they'll catch more errors. The thing is that if I used your policy
of only scanning or validating what I like, half of the books I've
validated might still be hanging out on step 1. I validate those
books out of a desire to make them available to people who want and
need them, but I can't honestly say them interest me enough to do a
cover to cover proofreading. As for scanning books for pleasure, for
me, there is a sort of tipping point where I'm investing so much time
fixing relatively small things that I lose the pleasure of reading
and it becomes a chore. Because of you, Elizabeth, and Cindy, I have
become more thorough in how I clean up books. However, I suspect
that some errors in books don't bother me as they do others because I
have no access to Braille. Since speech reads things comfortably, I
may not experience the frustrations you do with scanned text. My
basic requirement is that I am able to understand the text in the
book, and that's about it. Maybe my attitude stems from reading very
poor scans back in the 1980s and being used to scannos. I just know
that I don't really enjoy proofreading and don't have the drive for
perfection that some of the people here do. I do care about quality
and about our books. I guess I'm saying that to me it's important to
find balance in handling the books.
Monica Willyard
The problem is that Bookshare doesn't have the equipment to do a good job. If you really want your submitted book to be as good as it can be, you don't depend on Bookshare to make it so; you read the book and make the corrections as you go. This is why generally speaking I don't submit books I'm not willing to read; the book I am scanning right now just fits on the scanner platen and as a result, some of the page numbers don't show up, so I fill them in. Bookshare's tools certainly wouldn't be able to correct that.
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