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

[tribble]

Hi Joel --
the .bks extensions that was used for the old packages of daisy books was a 
proprietary format for which you downloaded a free tool from bookshare.org 
to unpack. It both compacted and encrypted the contents, and the books would 
each unpack into 5 or 6 files, including a .css file that was the same for 
all the books.  The .zip extension is similarly used now for both encryption 
and compaction.  You open the zip file and see the component files 
comprizing the book, but you can't extract any of them until you enter your 
bookshare password. The book then has a digital watermark embedded in it 
somewhere that makes it harder to share the book with someone else without 
being traced -- assuming anyone shares a book that gets back to someone at 
bookshare.
Anyway, not only is the packing mechanism different, but the component files 
for a DAISY book are also a little different.
You need a DAISY reader to read the file. You can download the latest 
VictorReaderSoft from bookshare for that purpose, or get another alternative 
reader. I personally use Freedom Scientific's FSReader and am quite happy 
with it, more so than with VRSoft.  But there are maybe a half dozen other 
readers.
Hope that answers your question.
--le


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Joel Deutsch" <jdeutsch at dslextreme.com>
To: "NFBnet GUI Talk Mailing List" <gui-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2009 10:14 AM
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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