We get very little grade level information currently and what we do get varies by source. In our work to improve our metadata, we will look at grade level data and see how much we can improve it!

Please add more specifics on your issues so we can better address the problems!

We spent a good bit of time to improve overall Braille quality last year, but we’re always listening for where we can continue to make systematic improvements. If you want to give specific examples feel free to do so here, or putting the information in the Contact Us form for “Technical Support” http://www.bookshare.org/contactUs. Also please do use the “Report Book Quality Issue” link in the right column of any title detail page and we will reprocess that book.

We are working on a Firefox add-on called AnyDaisy that will allow you to read Bookshare books in your browser.

At this point we don’t provide ePub as it violates the Chafee amendment requiring that books be “distributed in specialized formats exclusively for use by blind or other persons with disabilities.” That said we are looking at ways to serve a broader community of users that need alternative formats.

We actually do provide images in our books, but only in those that the source provider supplies them. So today we get those primarily from NIMAC books, but also oftentimes from publisher books. Scanned books today do not maintain the images though we are evaluating the ability to do so.

We will be delivering books to mp3 devices in the near future

1. Any device provider that has internet capabilities can build access to Bookshare.
2. Storing reading tools settings in the “cloud” for you to have access to regardless of device is a feature we’re evaluating.

We are in contact with the Blio team and as soon as they launch we will work to see if they are able to support the DAISY 3 standard to read books.

I’d like to split this idea out into two separate ones or just call it having an Android DAISY reader. Read:OutLoud is a product by Don Johnston, and likely best to report feedback to them on new OS platforms. We are working on an Android DAISY reader that will be free and open-source and in beta in fall of 2011. If you’re interested to participate please add comments, also knowing your device will help us for testing purposes.

This is something we are very keen to make happen, our first step is that our collection is available via a public API that anyone can use on their own site. We also need to work with other to develop a common way to share information and that’s what we’re evaluating! Keep adding collections you use most frequently to help us prioritize!

Specific magazines would be helpful to know if you can add comments here. Just a note: we currently get all of our periodicals and magazines through NFB-Newsline. It’s also a good idea to file any sort of book/collection request in http://www.bookshare.org/contactUs

Any device that supports “accessible” book formats (DAISY) can read Bookshare books. If a partner is open to working with us to support this format on their device we have an excellent, standard API to make the integration extremely simple! This is a device we have been working to partner with if it helps – but we encourage you to reach out to them directly as well!

This is under review for work. I will work with the volunteer team and through VAT to make sure we get it right!

We actually do provide images where the source provider gives them to us – for example all of our NIMAC books have images. We are working on improving the descriptions of those images for those that cannot see them readily.

Absolutely agree! We want to provide it by recent and by categories, and would love to hear other ideas about how you’d like your feeds parsed.

We are considering this possibility, there are some legal challenges we’ll have to review.

We are investigating the incorporation of MARC and library subject headings into the library.

This was echoed at the NFB meeting as well particularly with all the new books going in – we will likely make some improvements here in the near-term