My very last rant on bookshare (I promise)
They really should have a rating for books received directly from the
publisher. I'd gotten permission from one particular publisher to
upload *all* his books to bookshare. There's some 2-3 hundred books,
I owned them all in electronic format, and was going to take the time
to put them all on book share. On the site, it says if you have a
lot of books to submit, ask them, and they'll give you information or
something to make it easier/where to upload them or something. I
contacted them about this, and was told there was no such provision,
and each book would have to be uploaded manually. Thing was, I
couldn't state in the quality column that they were copies directly
from the publisher, best I could do was say excellent condition, but
this doesn't mean a damned thing since the quality of most books
aren't what's claimed anyway. After taking the time to upload two of
these books, and seeing how much work is involved in doing so, I gave
up. They use a database, why not give me the format, I could put all
the descriptions, authors, titles, publisher, status, and so on into
a file that matches their format, drop the books on an ftp server
they can get at, and everyone would be happy, instant mass import,
and no checking necessary to ensure quality of uploads.
Anyway, for me, it was really the lack of quality that drove me
away. At least if I knew the quality was poor, I'd not spend so much
time trying to read the silly thing. Some books are so bad you just
can't read them, because every third word you're trying to figure out
what the hell it is.
Add to that the trouble I had with their unpack tool, and I honestly
see no reason to support them. It's nice they're doing this, and if
folks can use it, then more power to them, but I won't give them any
more money, nor will I volunteer to help upload books to them anymore.
