My Personal Electronic LibraryHow Electronic Books Help The BlindBy Garnet R. ChaneyFrom: webmill_com
To: Robert JacobI have been working steadily to build my own personal electronic reference library. At this point I have about 400 books that I personally own scanned into the computer. When my budget allows me, I send a lot of this scanning work to foreign countries as part of a computer and internet technologies training program that is my favorite charity. It's my hope that my Amazon income will enable me to pursue this project on a fulltime basis. I think of this collection as being my personal internet, but filled with the kind of indepth knowledge that I am interested in. Of course it's free of popups and advertising too! I have another 20,000 books in storage just waiting to be added. I started that project because I was tired of paying excess baggage fees when I fly to different places. With the books scanned, I can carry a bookcase or so worth of books whereever I go. I have not finished proofreading the OCR of all the books, so I carry around the original scans with me on a Firewire disk drive. I maintain several copies of the collection on different drives, and also on different sets of backup media. I'll keep one or two of the books I am currently reading on my local hard drive. As I read the book, I proofread the OCR. My hope is to eventually have all of them with me in HTML, or PDF at the most. When I buy other people's eBooks, I will only buy them if they are in straight PDF format, and amazon offers a lot of ebooks in that format. I will not buy an ebook that is designed for any of the ebook specific softwares just because I don't want to have to deal with the "oh no the ebook is locked to this machine or that". The original scans of a book on Pearl Harbor took 100 megabytes of disk space. Converted to HTML it takes just 10 megabytes. It'll .ZIP to just 2 megabytes. (That's for a book that is entirely black and white, color would be 3 to 5 times that size.) Probably, if my entire collection were digested to HTML, I could fit everything I've done so far on just or two CDs. There is one community that absolutely loves and benefits from eBooks: The blind. Check out http://www.bookshare.org If you can prove that you are blind, you can join their site, and download any of the 14,000 books they have, for a low monthly membership fee. There is a special exemption in the U.S. copyright law that permits the reproduction of publications into specialized formats for the disabled. www.Bookshare.org makes the books available in formats compatible with popular text-to-braille converters and also text to speech softwares. Someday my entire collection will be donated to this site. Their site was originally started with a collection 5000 books that a blind individual had scanned into his computer over a period of 10 years. I wish I had that amount of time and dedication to scan a book a day. Tim O'Reilly, President of O'Reilly, a publisher of leading-edge computer books, has this to say about providing books through Bookshare.org: "At O'Reilly, we've made books available in readable formats to the blind on an ad-hoc basis for years, and we think it's absolutely terrific that Benetech is taking a lot of the hassle out of this service -- which all publishers and authors should support -- by providing an infrastructure that helps the end users help themselves.I'm quite happy with the level of security and authentication that Bookshare.org provides. I'm also delighted that they are getting out front on this issue. Providing books online for a disadvantaged community for whom they are not now available takes nothing away from publishers or authors, but gives a great deal to a segment of society that is not now well served by publishers." I hope all the authors here who have their own books will check into supporting bookshare.org with electronic copies of their books.- Garnet http://www.yer.us From: Herb Smith
To: webmill_comExcellent read. Thank you. | 