I know I'm preaching to the choir here but I guess I hope someone from Bookshare staff will see this and begin to think how the situation can be improved. I am presently reading for pleasure Out of the Deep I cry by Julia Spencer-fleming. It is a mystery and I highly recommend her books for you mystery buffs out there. This book has an excellent rating and was scanned, of course, by the infamous bookshare volunteer. I may be exaggerating a bit but there is hardly a page in this book that does not have a mistake of some type, including such things as die for the, mat for that, etc. etc. My point in talking about this is to say that it is obvious that neither the submitter nor the validator read this book. In my opinion if the submitter has not read the book being submitted, this should be made clear, then hopefully only a validator who is interested in reading the book should take it. I can understand if someone volunteers to scan a book on the wish list that they are really not that interested in, but in that case it is even more important that thevalidator wants to read the book. If no validator wants to read it including the person who put it on the wish list, then I would suggest that the book isn't worth being in the colection. I hope some day I feel like taking the time to rescan this book because I am ashamed that it will be left on the excellent list otherwise. And, of course, that means Bookshare will pay $10 instead of $5 to have the book in the collection. I know this book can't have been in the collection for a long time by the way it is presented in braille. That means that scanners are capable of doing a far better job of scanning than is seen here. I recently validated a book submitted by Jim Baugh and you know what a great job he does. I was reading the book along with others and realized I was really holding up his book too long so I put it through Kurzweil's paces and submitted it. When I picked it up later as an approved book to finish reading it, I recorded 22 mistakes that I had missed. That is an acceptable number even though I feel bad about it but I think it proves how necessary it is that someone, be it submitter or validator really reads the book from cover to cover. And now that validators are being paid $2.50 per book, that means that only twenty books need to be read carefully per year in order to maintain a free membership. Thank you all for letting me vent and I sincerely hope that the Bookshare staff can find some way to express these concerns to those volunteers not on this list. Jill
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