[Dtb-talk] bookshare vs. nls

[Flint Million]

There does not seem to be much rhyme or reason to how NLS is deciding
which books to convert to digital format. The only thing they've said
about this in their documents is as follows:

Q: Why are some books from a series missing?  Why are some magazine
issues missing?
A: Production schedules can cause inadvertent delays.

Pretty vague, eh?

In either case, Bookshare tends to be able to expand their library
faster because they're not doing real human readings of the books.
Their content comes from volunteers who scan or convert materials into
text format. then they simply DAISY-ify them and throw them up on the
site. In contrast, NLS must have a volunteer reader read the content
into digital form (or convert the existing cassette version), then
have someone scan through the recording to insert all of the DAISY
navigation points. It can be quite a laborious process. Also, it does
seem that Bookshare has a lot more of a "blanket" copyright exemption
in place, while NLS titles announce "with the permission of the
copyright holder". Maybe this also causes NLS delays, at least in
getting new titles produced. As for why they have only spanish
versions of some books, that's just their quirky schedule at work, but
it does mean it's likely that the english version will be soon to
follow, hopefully.

FM

On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 12:02 PM, Mike Gilmore <m_b_gilmore at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I've been browsing bookshare's list of books. I've liked that it and NLS have a lot of the same stuff; however, I was also impressed that it has books that NLS does not. For example, there are two Agatha Christie books that bookshare has that NLS does not. Actually, one of the books NLS does have but it's in Spanish, which is kind of odd considering that Agatha Christie is a British author and they have pretty much all of her other stuff in English except for the title I'm talking about (it's a Poirot book.) So, why put all of the Poirot books in English recordings except for one and put that in Spanish? Thank goodness for bookshare for those of us who want to read all of the books or series by a particular author!
>
> Mike
>
>
>
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