[Dtb-talk] bookshare vs. nls

[Mike Freeman]

Actually, I've had two books I've suggested be done by NLS.

Mike

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lynn Evans" <evans-lynn at comcast.net>
To: "Discussion of Digital Talking Books" <dtb-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 11, 2010 6:19 PM
Subject: Re: [Dtb-talk] bookshare vs. nls


> 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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>>
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