[Dtb-talk] Bookshare vs. nls

Fri Mar 12 17:57:23 UTC 2010

Of course, there's another essential difference between NLS and
Bookshare that accounts in part for the differences in which materials
appear and when.

NLS is an entirely publicly-funded library, and it's function is
precisely that.  It functions as a public library and attempts to
provide access to a wide and representative number of titles to  a wide
and diverse patronage.  It's quality is absolutely unassailable, using
professional narrators and sound engineers.  And as such it is
necessarily limited by its resources in how much it can produce and
distribute.  

Bookshare is still very much a child of the Internet, its collection as
much built by volunteers and what they want to scan for themselves as by
the increasing numbers of publisher textbooks and publisher and author
contributed titles.  It's quality fluctuates somewhat more than does
NNLS's, but in that it is far more flexible and speedy at getting things
into circulation.

I understand the draw for NLS to license commercially recorded books
(unabridged, of course)   because it likely allows them to stretch their
budget.  However, the ones I've listened to are not enjoyable for me.
Commercial readers - actors -- cannot resist the temptation to get
dramatic.  I find this distracting ... okay, it's cheesy.  One instance
I think of was a book about Teddy Roosevelt (River of Doubt, I think),
and the actor reading it did the most gawd-awful T.R. imitation.  And
there are others, of course.  What I've always valued in the NLS
recordings that the narrators are at once successful in communicating
the meaning and so on of the text and of not drawing attention to
themselves over the actual text.  It is truly an indication of the high
degree of skill and professionalism in the contractors used by NLS.

Dan

Dan Burke
Assistant  Director/Assistige Technology Coordinator

Disability Services for Studentstss
The University of Montana
Emma B. Lommasson Center 154
Missoula, MT 59812

406.24.4424
406.243.5330 FAX

www.umt.edu/dss

-----Original Message-----
From: dtb-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:dtb-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org]
On Behalf Of Flint Million (Mobile E-mail)
Sent: Friday, March 12, 2010 9:45 AM
To: Discussion of Digital Talking Books
Subject: Re: [Dtb-talk] bookshare vs. nls

Thanks for the clarification Dave. I suppose it may be that, for
example, book 2 of a series passed all the QC but book 1 is having to be
redubbed etc. 

FM

Sent from my Nokia N95 Smartphone.

-original message-
Subject: Re: [Dtb-talk] bookshare vs. nls
From: "Andrews, David B B (DEED)" <David.B.Andrews at state.mn.us>
Date: 03/12/2010 9:30 AM

Flint:

Bookshare.org and NLS operate under the same exact copyright law and
provisions.  The message you hear on some books, about copyright
permission was probably from an older recording before the Chafee
amendments.

There are lots of reasons that not all books in a series are currently
available, or become available out of order.  Stuff may be recorded at
different studios.  Stuff goes through the Quality Assurance process at
different rates and at different times, contractors change etc.  NLS has
decided to get stuff out as soon as it is ready, even if that means a
series would be out of order.

Dave

-----Original Message-----
From: dtb-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:dtb-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org]
On Behalf Of Flint Million
Sent: Thursday, March 11, 2010 4:26 PM
To: Discussion of Digital Talking Books
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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