[Dtb-talk] bookshare vs. nls

[Lynn Evans]

NLS only contracts out 20,000 books a year to have payed, professional 
narrators read the books, and convert the recordings to DAISY.

Patrons of the service can contact their libraries to make suggestions on 
what books should be chosen to be produced as talking books. A committee 
then gets together once a year to make the selection.

Production schedules can cause inadvertent delays.

I can assure you NLS production standards are quite a bit higher then 
BookShare will ever be. NLS has a high standard and a lot of quality goes 
into the production before the books are released to the patron.

As for serial books:

You can have it one of two ways. Like they have it now, the book is released 
when the book reaches the production and standard level of NlS expectations.

Or

Have all serial books be released in order they were written. So what we 
have is book 1 has a production issue and needs more work wile book 2 is 
ready for release. So NLS sits on book 2 until book 1 is ready and book 3 is 
now ready to go also. So NLS holds onto book 3 until book 1 is ready.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Flint Million" <fmillion at gmail.com>
To: "Discussion of Digital Talking Books" <dtb-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 11, 2010 5:25 PM
Subject: Re: [Dtb-talk] bookshare vs. nls


> 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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