[bksvol-discuss] Re: Bookshare's Purpose in Your Eyes
- From: "Mary Otten" <maryotten@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 09 Jun 2004 14:22:24 -0500
Hi Donna,
You're right about buying books and not getting around to reading them. I've
got a bunch to scan that fit that category perfectly. <sigh> On the other hand,
when I chose to buy the book, I knew in advance that its
quality was perfect. Not so here, even with the ones rated excellent, although
there certainly are many very fine quality books on Bookshare. So until it can
be demonstrated that all the books are perfect, or as perfect
as the printed hard copy, I still see a difference. Would you pay for a book
and then, finding that it had missing letters, garbled pages or a bunch of junk
characters, keep it anyway? Or would you take it back to the
store for a refund? Obviously a rhetorical question. <smile>
Further, at the point of considering a purchase, I've got immediate access to
the full blurb on the book jacket and, if buying on line, also to the reviews
on sites like Amazon to help me make a decision, go or no go. On
Bookshare, I may have a short synopsis, in a few cases even a long one, which
gives the same info as the book jacket. And if I take the time, I can open
Amazon in another browser and read about the book, as I can
with one I'm considering purchasing. So I suppose you might argue that the
access to info about the book is the same, albeit it in a much less convenient
form. Still, for me, the over-riding fact here is that there are all
those thousands of hours of labor which went into making these books accessible
at all. We have people on here, I'm not one of them, who scan books just
because they think the collection could use items in a
given category, even if they themselves aren't too interested in those books
for personal reading. Those folks who do that aren't getting paid a dime for
that work. I suppose the furthest I'd be willing to go on this
payment issue would be to have a method whereby we would pay a nominal sum, not
to exceed what the author would actually receive from the sale of the book in a
store, not the list price, for books donated directly
by authors. Probably logistically impossible. But it would ensure that authors
weren't losing any money on the books they donate whose quality is known to be
the same as that of the hard-copy equivalents. Of course,
publishers wouldn't hear of it, because their cut, the lion's share, would be
lost.
Mary
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