[bksvol-discuss] Re: Bookshare & PQ submissions
- From: "Mayrie ReNae" <mrenae@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 7 Aug 2008 15:33:35 -0700
Hi Carrie and Pavi,
All that you say here I understand completely. There are, however,
a couple of cases in which replacing a truly excellent copy of a book
scanned and validated by conscientious volunteers would be, in my opinion,
harmful to the Bookshare collection. Children's books that have had picture
descriptions and handwritten pages typed in by volunteers, and books of
poetry in which stanzas have been preserved would be of lower quality from
the publishers. Obviously copies of childrens' books from the publisher
will not include picture descriptions. If handwriting is preserved in the
text of publisher quality books as handwriting, , no screen reader will read
that. And finally, poetry that is not protected from having all of its
stanzas and lines run together is no longer poetry, but prose, which it was
not intended to be.
I understand that to keep your contract with publishers, you must
keep only their copies of books. That can't probably be changed. I do
think it is important to note that there will be in some few cases, some
important things lost by removing scanned copies of books from the Bookshare
collection. I doubt that there is anything that can be done. But this is a
sad situation to me.
I would suggest that members grab any books whose quality might
suffer in ways that I have noted, and others that I haven't thought of, that
they want to read that might be replaced by publisher quality books now
before they are replaced.
Mayrie
-----Original Message-----
From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Pavi Mehta
Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2008 2:20 PM
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: Lisa Friendly
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Bookshare & PQ submissions
Hi All,
In the light of recent discussions on the list regarding Publisher quality
submissions we wanted to send an email to all of you to clarify Bookshare's
position on this.
While volunteers continue to be our primary source of books being put into
the collection, upgrading books already in the collection continues to be
one of Bookshare?s primary goals. Many volunteers have contributed
thousands of hours in improving books in the collection, and they do a great
job! But publishers have resources that allow them to create perfect copies
of books. Bookshare would like every single book in the collection to be
absolutely perfect, and this goal actually might be achievable if we can
convince publishers to donate e-book versions of their books. Many of the
Publisher Quality books that we receive are in perfect condition, but not
quite all at this point, as the technology is evolving in the publishing
industry.
We need to encourage publishers to donate their books, since eventually they
will be donating ONLY perfect books. And wouldn?t that be wonderful? Imagine
every single book in the collection being perfect! Currently it?s a goal,
but someday, maybe not too far away, it might be possible to achieve it.
We know that thousands of volunteers have contributed hundreds of thousands
of hours of effort in putting books into the collection, and we acknowledge
that the vast majority of our books are in excellent condition. But
upgrading our books will always be a primary goal, and to that end, we will
replace current books with publisher quality books. It is also very
important for us to let our volunteer community know that this replacement
policy is in fact a requirement of the contracts that we sign with the
publishing houses.
To the extent possible, we will also inform the volunteers of the books that
publishers will be sending us, so as to not duplicate efforts. With every
batch of books that publishers send us, there are software changes required
in our processing of their books, so the books are currently being added to
the collection in at a fairly slow trickle. But we are pretty optimistic
that in the near future, the speed of donating books and processing them
will increase. Our mandate from the US Department of Education is to put
100,000 new books into the collection in 5 years. We have no doubt that we
will meet that goal, especially with all the Publisher Quality books that we
are being given by the forward-thinking publishers who are so generous with
their time, efforts and books. Huge thanks to O?Reilly, HarperCollins,
Scholastic, and other publishing houses and to all of you as we continue to
grow the collection as a team.
Carrie Karnos and Pavi Mehta
Bookshare.org
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