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

[Amanda Lee]

Actually, I am not saying this with predjudice so please don't think that
I am talking out of personal preference by making a statement which isn't
factual but I am making the following statement which is indeed a fact.

Open book relies upon an earlier version of Fineengine than does the
Kurzweil K1000 and this particular OCR Engine is slower than the more
current version.

I wouldn't be surprised that the next release of Open Book will offer the
latest version of Finengine.

I prefer K1000 for this reason and for other reasons I won't go into here
because this is indeed way off topic ha!

Still, if one has made an investment in one of these fine products which
are indeed designed for persons who are blind but also are way above
standard in terms of how they produce translation from print to text, as
long as that product is reliable and works well for the individual, ther
is no need really to dump one for the other as they are comparable in
quality.

Amanda Lee



On Fri, 15 Mar 2002, Gregory Nowak wrote:

> I humbley disagree that the windows ocr programs should be dumpped. First, the ocr engine in something like gocr is not as good as it is in openbook for example. In fact, I believe that someone on this list stated a while back that they thought that openbook ruby had the best ocr engine out there. Second, even though there may be kernel drivers for them, SANE doesn't support every scanner out there. This is why the windows ocr packages cannot be dumpped, at least not until they are comparible in their performance to their gnu/linux counterparts.
> Greg
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 15, 2002 at 01:30:30PM -0500, Janina Sajka wrote:
> > Forget OpenBook and K1000 and all that Windows <expletive deleted> stuff,
> > use scanimage and gocr from the command line. It works.
> >
> >
> > On Fri, 15 Mar 2002, Ann Parsons wrote:
> >
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > Gena, a couple of misconceptions here.  First, one doesn't have to buy
> > > the book in order to scan it.  One can request the book from a regular
> > > library and scan it.  As for the cost of K1000 or Ruby, yes, these do
> > > cost, and it is a shame that such things have to cost as much as they
> > > do.
> > >
> > > There are scholarships available through various organizations,
> > > apparently.    I think what they are trying to do is to get Lions or
> > > something similar to donate the money so that folks who can not afford
> > > the fee will be able to do so.    I think they are also looking for
> > > organizations who want to scan books.
> > >
> > > I know it looks like things are sort of skewed, and I know they need
> > > to do more about getting access via Lynx and that, but the idea is
> > > sound.
> > >
> > > I'm not sure what formats they require.  I do know that there are
> > > strict rules about not submitting stuff that has been scanned for you,
> > > like text books and all, or propriatary materials from a university.
> > > They're working on all this.  It's only a couple of weeks old.
> > > They'll work out the kinks.
> > >
> > > Ann P.
> > >
> > >
> >
> > --
> >
> > 				Janina Sajka, Director
> > 				Technology Research and Development
> > 				Governmental Relations Group
> > 				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)
> >
> > Email: janina at afb.net		Phone: (202) 408-8175
> >
> > Chair, Accessibility SIG
> > Open Electronic Book Forum (OEBF)
> > http://www.openebook.org
> >
> >
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>
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