FW: USA: Online book-sharing service for the blind borrows a page from Napster

Georgina gena at gena-j.net
Thu Mar 14 20:27:12 EST 2002


Hi

Please see my message on the cost of producing these books.  To say that 
someone with low income can recooperate some or all of their costs is got to 
be missleading.

As you already know my feelings on the cost of K1000 there's no need for me 
to go into that but if someone can't afford a scanner and K1000 or even Open 
Book Ruby, how are they going to recooperate some or all of the cost?

Surely, corretcing is out of the question too?  Firstly, they'd have to go 
and buy the book and then be able to compare words and other symbols on the 
screen with that on the printed pages of the book.

Furthermore, that's if they can afford to use Windows to use the above ocr 
packages.  I understood that the image files were also required, thus only 
Windows users might and I say might be the only ones to be able to submit 
scanned material.  What is the required format?

It'll be very interesting to see how many people will be in a position to 
submit material to the project.

Gena



>Actually, the cost is $50 per year.  First year there is a $25 setup fee.
>But as stated, if you contribute by submitting books that you scan,
>correct errors and do what they call Publish to submit books already
>uploaded and/or do what is known as Basic Publish whereby you clean-up
>their database to reflect appropriate information about the entried
>therein, you earn fifty cents per title.  To download and correct a book,
>you earn $2.50.  Do ten of those per year, you earn half of your annual
>membership.
>
>So, there are ways that a person with limited income resources can benefit
>and still use the service.
>
>Amanda Lee
>
>
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Speakup mailing list
>Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
>http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup




More information about the Speakup mailing list