[gui-talk] the new and improved bookshare.org

Baracco, Andrew W Andrew.Baracco at va.gov
Wed Jan 21 17:21:07 UTC 2009


Files with the .BKS extension could only be unpacked using a proprietary
piece of software only available from Bookshare.

Andy
 

-----Original Message-----
From: gui-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:gui-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org]
On Behalf Of Joel Deutsch
Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2009 8:14 AM
To: NFBnet GUI Talk Mailing List
Subject: Re: [gui-talk] the new and improved bookshare.org

L.

I'm not a Bookshare person now, although I might jhoin in future. Two
things you said confused me. I hope you'll explain.

You say that the book files used to be "encrypted" as .bks files, and
now they're encrypted as .zip files. Well, I'm unfamiliar with the first
file extension, so I can't guess if that means how a single book or
group of books is downloaded, or whether what's downloaded has to be
extracted then.

But I know that .zip files are generally not an encryption method but
rather file compression to make a package smaller, and that you have to
simply unzip (unpack) that in order to have all the compressed files
extract themselves and be ready to use.

So is the first extension you minion actually a proprirateary file type,
as .obx is for Open Book, for instance, and you need a special reader to
make use of them? Same way you need a copy of Open Book to access an
.obx file? 
Or is it a compression type I just haven't heard of?

And is the .zip extension used by Booshare for encryption  in some way
that I never heard about regarding the uses of the .zip method?

Thanks a lot. you might guess, correctly, that I'm so ignorant about how
Bookshare works that I thought its inventory consisted simply of scanned
text files that you downloaded as they were or maybe as .zip files and
then extracted to use them. i guess it's more complicated, what with
these additional file types, such as  .css, that you mention being
involved, too.

thanks,
Joel
----- Original Message -----
From: "tribble" <lauraeaves at yahoo.com>
To: "Multiple recipients of NFBnet GUI-TALK Mailing List" 
<gui-talk at NFBnet.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2009 10:43 PM
Subject: [gui-talk] the new and improved bookshare.org


Hi all --
I just downloaded and copied a bunch of books from the new bookshare.org
which uses zip files rather than .bks to encrypt its books.
I noticed that there is now a different set of .css files than there
used to
be -- previously there was 1 file (I forget the name) that was the same
for
all the books, so if you unpacked a bunch of books in the same
directory,
that one file was shared.
Now there are 3 or more css files common to all the books, and I sent
mail
to support at bookshare.org asking if they could be shared -- i.e.., can I
still extract all the files to one directory. Their reply was that all
the
books should be in their own directory.
Anyway, this seems like a waste, but apparently it's from the horse's
mouth
so I'm passing it along.
I wonder what to do with all the books I have previously downloaded --
perhaps I should create a new folder for the new bookshare.org.
Anyway, happy reading.
--le


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