Jim
I have no doubt that the stripper properly prepares
the book for use and
navigation with the Daisy player as it was designed
to.
Similarily, the .brf copy follows standards for that
medium.
The issue, it would appear, is that a whole bunch of
us read BookShare
books on hybrid equipment or programs which may or
may not give
satisfactory results regardless of modifications
made to the stripper.
What is particularly disappointing with Charlene's
book is that she took
great pains in preserving headers which, using
programs such as K1000,
could easily be used to find categories within the
book.
What I would suggest as a solution to this dilemma
is twofold:
(1) create a 3rd category of downloadable book in
addition to .brf and
.daisy, calling it something like raw.
This would be the book in a form prior to stripping
and massaging.
(2) As the stripper is essential to the preparation
of books for Daisy
players, leave suggestions for changes to it solely
to those who actually
use Daisy players.
As an experiment for testing the feasibility of (1)
outlined above, would
it be possible to create a test sampling of titles
in raw form so those of
us who would prefer unstripped books could test
that idea out with some
actual BookShare material.
I believe that a lot of us didn't fully understand
what the stripper does
because we were unfamiliar in how it was involved
withDaisy production.
So abolishing the stripper or not using it is hardly
a practical solution
as doing that would create its own set of headaches.
Perhaps if a third type of book, the raw book, were
a downloadable option,
this might resolve many of the complaints.
If this solution proved satisfactory, it might be
the cheapest one for
Benetech as it would require the least programmer
time.
From your end, it might also prove useful to survey
veteran (users with
the service for over 6 months) to find out what
equippment they use for
reading BookShare users.
I, when I began with the service from almost day
one, initially used the
supplied Daisy player.
Over time, I moved away from them to what I use now
namely K1000 and my
Book Port.
I, as a matter of fact, don't even have a Daisy
player on my pc system.
As noted above, if you could create a page giving us
a handful of books in
their raw unstripped unprepared form, it would be an
inexpensive test to
see if "we can live without the stripper".
Mike
