Hello all. I am sure that many others will chime in here, but I have not
read anyone else's thoughts yet. Personally, I think it should be a little
bit of both. In other words, it should be like a bookstore in that it
should have the latest bestsellers and the like, but it should also be like
a library since it should attempt to make every book ever published
available in an accessible form.
For a long time, I religiously checked Web-Braille. I found ways to search
their catalog for books not yet released in hardcopy Braille and that they
had not announced to the general public. That is until I became a member
of bookshare.org. I put off joining because I did not want to pay the $50
plus a $25 setup fee. However, when I checked _Braille Book Review_ for
May-June 2002 and found almost nothing at all which interested me, I
decided to join. Even with a limit of 100 books per month, that is only
pennies per book. This is not as good as being totally free, but I was now
able to download about 10,000 books at the time when Web-Braille only had
about half that many. Also, if I downloaded the DAISY format, I could
instantly have a plain text copy without running the file through a Braille
translator as I did with Web-Braille. The book was in one file instead of
several volumes. No more did I have to search nine files to find something
in a reference book.
Is bookshare.org perfect? Definitely not. I think it would be impossible
to please everyone. As far as improvements, one thing I would really,
really like to see is more newspapers and magazines. At least with
Web-Braille, I can read _PC World_ with everyone else, even if it is a
couple months behind. The problem I have now is that NLS only ships some
magazines on cassette. A good example is _Ellery Queen's Mystery
Magazine_. I beg anyone who has printed issues to please scan them. It is
annoying for me to have to listen to a magazine on two four-track
cassettes. I would much rather read it myself. Hey, I can store it on
CD-ROM if I want, along with my other thousand books I downloaded. That is
very appealing!
Another problem with bookshare.org is the category system and the lack of
synopses for many titles. Well, that is actually two separate problems,
but they are somewhat related. The category system problem is minor. I
would like to be able to get a complete list of all 3,000 books in the
science fiction category without downloading a bunch of web pages which
only list 50 at a time. Maybe there is a legal reason for this, but I
don't see what it is. If you (the staff) are concerned about the general
public getting the complete book list, set this up only for members or
something. I do not agree with the idea of splitting the subcategories
into smaller sub-subcategories. How, for example, do you set apart the
different types of mysteries. There are espionage stories, private
detective stories, romances with some suspense, suspenses with some
romance, etc. I fail to see how anyone can split these off and still be
fair. I do wish that _Star Trek_ and _Star Wars_ had their own categories
though.
Regarding the synopsis problem, I wish there was a way that volunteers or
members could go back and fill in synopses when they are missing or
incomplete. Yes, folks, people do look at them. I cannot emphasize how
unhelpful "none" is. As far as combining the long and short into one, I
say only accept one long synopsis and arbitrarily split it at 200
characters. If people want to see the part that got cut off, they can open
the book information page. This is how most large databases are designed,
at least based on what I have seen. I again emphasize that a useful
synopsis is important! This is something that potential members and
contributors look at.
There is one more issue which needs to be addressed. It is critical that
volunteers do the best they can. Why? Because I know of at least one
author who was turned away by what he didn't see. His name is Jack French
and he recently wrote a book related to old time radio. I know there are
other blind people here who care about OTR, but since he saw not even one
scan, he decided that no one would be interested so did not submit a
digital copy. I have contacted several authors of books about OTR and I
got a couple interested, but they were worried about piracy. I would
suggest clearly pointing out links for authors on the home page and doing
even more to emphasize that piracy is a very small issue because of the
membership structure. I did get one author of science fiction books to
donate digital copies of all six books he wrote. They are the Starman
series. Just look for "Starman" in the title search. My thanks to Mr.
Jonathan Cooper. He also submitted several scans from his personal
collection. I am not trying to brag, I am only trying to point out that
potential authors do look at every book you validate and submit. If there
are obvious errors, that could be one less author's books you will see posted.
I would like to mentione one more wonderful thing about bookshare.org in
closing. Even now with Web-Braille, it could take a year or more to see
some titles show up. The best example is the latest Harry Potter
book. Last year, bookshare.org had it the day after it hit the
streets. NLS took until this year to finally post it and I think it was in
12 or 14 volumes. It is wonderful to actually have books available the
year they were published. I can now get books on my want list within days
or weeks of publication, not years. For the first time that I can
remember, I can now concentrate on getting those older, out of print
mystery and science fiction titles rather than trying to find something
from the current decade. It amazes me how long it takes NLS to get even
the bestsellers distributed.
In closing, that is my opinion of bookshare.org. I think that overall they
are a great organization. If I could change one thing, I would say to add
more magazines. If one thing needs to be improved, I would say the
synopsis problem. Do you have a favorite author? Does he or she have
email? Write to them and explain about bookshare.org. About 99% of them
have never heard of accessibility for the blind and have no clue about
bookshare.org. They just might work with you. If you want to contact me
off list, I will send you the email which I have been sending to
authors. I hope my comments are beneficial to someone.
