[Faith-talk] bookshare

[Ryan Kwaak]

In response to your questions:

1. Bookshare offers a few good devotionals from authors such as
Charles Spurgeon and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. There are also Christian
fiction books from Frank Peretti and Randy Alcorn.
2. You search for books by entering the title, author, or ISBN into
the search input box. Press E to cut right to it in JAWS. When your
results come back, the site gives you the title and author of the book
followed by a brief synopsis and then offers you the options to
download in DAISY or BRF. The BRF option does not require a DAISY
player and does not use synthesized speech but lets you use a Braille
display with JAWS if you have it. That requires you have a Braille
translator to translate the Braille file into text. I recommend using
WINBT for this purpose. It's simple to use and well-documented. To
download it, go to http://EmpowermentZone.com/wbtsetup.exe.
3. As far as I know, the cost is $50 per year, but you can get a
five-year membership for free if you tell them you are a student.
4. The process of reading the book depends on whether you have
downloaded the DAISY or BRF versions of the book. If you get the Daisy
version, unzip the book (the downloads don't take that long). To play
the DAISY book on a computer, use FSReader from Freedom Scientific
which is included with JAWS versions 11 and later. To use the BRF, get
WinBT and use it to translate the BRF file to text and then use a
Braille display to read it in a text editor. For the Bictor Stream,
you just have to download the ZIP file for the Daisy book or the BRF
file for the Braille book and copy them into the stream with either
the Humanware Companion or standard Windows copy-and-pasting.
5. NLS books take more time to record because humans need to
phusically be there to record them . The books you get from Bookshare
are compiled using an OCR engine to scan the printed page and are thus
faster to produce and available quicker than with NLS books.

Hope this helps.

On 11/2/11, Ashley Bramlett <bookwormahb at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I was wondering details on bookshare; not a member yet. All those books are
> text based, not audio format right?
> If I’m listening, I can better comprehend via a human voice, not synthesized
> speech.
>
> Some questions.
> 1. What Christian resources have you seen? Books? Devotionals?
> 2. How do you search for books? I know you can do this without being a
> member. The site looked complex when I attempted to use it.
> 3. Is the cost $75? And do you have to prove you’re blind? I already get NLS
> and learning ally books.
> 4. How do you play/read the books? I guess they have to be unzipped once you
> download them. I have a vr stream so might use that if I can figure out how
> to transfer a book.
> 5. Books are written everyday and published. The thing with NLS and learning
> Ally is by the time they record a book it’s a year late or more. That is why
> often the editions of books are one behind your print classmates.
> So, does bookshare have recent books? I mean like in the past six months?
>
> Thanks. I’ve really thought about joining bookshare, but I don’t have the
> patience to wade through a website and download stuff. I went on the site
> several times and clicked on books and it kept bringing me to lists of other
> books or categories. My jaws internet skills are pretty good. I just don’t
> want to spend hours trying to download a book.
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