[Dtb-talk] bookshare vs. nls

[Flint Million]

I forgot to mention that NLS is now getting permission to simply adapt
existing commercial audiobooks, which is actually a nice thing for us
blind folks. They take the commercial CD book, encrypt it and insert
DAISY markers, and distribute it to us. Saves them the effort of the
volunteer reading, which is really nice. And in some cases, commercial
books are already nicely arranged for them (e.g. each CD track is one
chapter)

FM

On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 4:25 PM, Flint Million <fmillion at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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