[Athen] My opinion on Bookshare

[Deborah Armstrong]

I've been wanting to write this up for a while. There's been conversation on the list about the errors in Bookshare books, and here's my take:
I became a Bookshare member in 2002; I was an early adopter and was downloading books a month after the organization got started. As a service that lets people share books they scanned, it worked great. Nobody expected perfection. We were happy to jus have the book to read.
Books on their platform work great if you just want to read with speech or Braille. But if you expect good formatting, reliable page markup - reliable any markup in fact, forget it. The problem isn't necessarily with their books but with the promise that you'll get the same experience as if you could read the printed book. You won't!
Last year I was struggling to learn SQL. I'm still not very good at it. This was mainly because the books had diagrams that weren't included in either the PDFS I got from the publisher for my courses or the ones on Bookshare. The publisher can decide not to include images. They want you after all to buy the book. Or at least rent it.
I ended up renting one of my textbooks so I could have all the images, even though I'm blind. I can always get someone to describe an image if it's actually in the book. (Even so I never really grasped the difference between inner joins and outer joins.)
Bookshare is great for fiction, literature and essay-style nonfiction. I like reading technical books in Braille and Bookshare makes that possible as well. It's just not very useful for textbooks if you expect the printed textbook experience. The publisher can give Bookshare the online version of the book which is missing content. They can choose to exclude all or some of the visual content. Or the book is scanned and therefore the formatting is non-existent or inconsistent.
I love Bookshare but that's because my expectations are pretty low.
--Debee

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