As a braille transcriber, I find Bookshare.org very interesting. Unlike the NLS and other braille libraries, Bookshare.org charges yearly membership fees and does not guarantee the quality of its books. Whereas every braille book I help to produce is transcribed by hand, Bookshare.org books are scanned. This means that they are not as perfect as they could be, but still they are better than nothing. As the Bookshare.org site explains,
Many of these publications will be carefully proofread, providing high quality full text, with structure and audio. The great majority, however, will simply be scanned books, redistributed in a digital format. Compared to investing three hours to scan a book, as each of thousands of disabled people do daily, the opportunity to instantly get a book equal in quality to a personal OCR scan will lower a major barrier to access.
Bookshare.org is not trying to replace the services of organizations that produce very high-quality books. They are merely trying to be better than nothing. Those who do not own a scanner can benefit from those who do, and even those who can scan their own books will share the labor of scanning.
It's good to see people tackling a problem with multiple solutions. When you can have at most two out of three of good,
cheap,
and fast,
not everyone should pick the same two.
(Link via LibrarianInBlack.)
Senji says:
I wonder if there's any mileage in trying to get texts of (recently published) books out of publishers; rather than having to use OCR...
Of course, given a universe in which such things as the Feet of Clay paperback edition exist the answer is probably "no".
Laurabelle says:
You know, I asked the same thing when I was starting braille transcription class (it really feels like manual transcription shouldn't be necessary these days), but the answer was that it just doesn't happen, that publishers aren't that helpful.
My instructor, Joyce, also has a very entertaining theory about an at every publishing company whose sole job is to make life difficult for braillists by putting text in different fonts, using funky layout, etc.
Some states require publishers to provide electronic versions of educational materials, but there is no standard format, which makes using the electronic files rather problematic. See Federal and State Legislation Regarding Accessible Instructional Materials for more information.