Hello,
I'm writing this message because I noticed there seem to be a lot of
problems with scanned books lately. And it doesn't matter if they're
on the wish list or not. The situation will go like this: Someone
scans a book and submits it. When a proofreader sees it on the
checkout list, it will say "quality: good" and they'll go ahead and
check it out. Then, when they check it back in, they're eventually
told they need to reject this book for one reason or another, after
doing all that work! Or, they'll see an interesting book that says
"quality: good" but when they open the file, the quality is not "good"
at all because it's full of garbled text, to the point where the book
doesn't even make sense anymore and it's nearly impossible to fix, or
not even worth the proofer's time. This is ridiculous. This is a
volunteer position, not a full-time, paying job. Some of us do not, or
will not in the near future, have all day to work on cleaning up a
file that either the conversion system, or the scanning machine, made
a terrible mess of. It's really frustrating. Just about every book
I've taken the time to proofread recently, after doing the best I
could to make it near perfect, had to be rejected. Personally, I'm
not going to have as much time after this summer to spend on
proofreading, because I'll be starting online college courses in the
fall. I'm also blind, so when I proofread, I basically have to read
the entire book to find all the errors; I can't just skim the document
visually to see what needs to be cleaned up. That takes a long time
for me, time that I will not have at the end of August. Furthermore,
you don't get volunteer credits depending on how many books you tried
to work on, but they have to be added to the collection. Not many
books I've proofread recently could bee added to the collection at
all, so I still can't pay for membership. Hopefully, I can get the
free student membership once I get into those college courses.
Another thing: how can you tell if the problem was with the conversion
system or the scan itself? Why are we getting these "good quality"
scans that are clearly not good enough for Bookshare, have several
missing pages, or the RTF files have just been totally trashed?
To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to
bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
put the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list of
available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line.
