Judy and others, please, pretty please, reject books that are unreadable like the ones you describe. It is so frustrating to take a book from step 1 and find out that it's messed up beyond repair. Even worse is when several people have taken it before and just put it back because another volunteer has to take it and run into the same problem. You are right that rescanning actually takes less time. I can scan an average paperback in about an hour and a half. Thick textbooks take longer, of course. If a book is going to take 10 or 15 hours just to make it somewhat legible, my vote is to reject it and let someone else rescan it. I don't expect perfection from anyone, and God knows I'm far from perfect. My early scans are pretty messy. Still, someone had the good sense to reject a couple of them and offered to teach me how to get decent scans. Getting the rejection notices didn't feel so good, but they did make me start asking what I was doing wrong. That was the right question to ask, and I got help. My scans began to improve, and I will always be grateful to those volunteers who mentored me. I don't think we help anyone by just returning messed up books to step 1 or letting them pass into the system. The submitter won't learn anything from the experience, and someone else will end up having to clean up the mess later.
Monica Willyard Judy s. wrote:
Another thing I've found on the validation list are many books that are listed as 'fair.' For me, as a validator, they are not worth the hours and hours of time it would take to try to turn into something that is just acceptable. I'm guessing it would be much faster to have those rescanned than have a validator try to fix them, from what I've seen.Judy s. cherryjam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
