Generation X

We've been making books and we would like to hear how accessible they are from your perspective, and what we can do differently to make them better.

Generation X

Post by
Sabina
»
Sun Feb 04, 2018 11:38 am
Feb. 6 update: We are not using Dropbox for this book. Here is a link to the item in the NNELS collection: https://nnels.ca/items/generation-x-tal ... ed-culture

My email from this morning explains how to get your NNELS login information.

If you want to know what the PDF looked like, we can email it to you directly to examine. Let me know!

Generation X by Douglas Coupland was a reader request, and also a complicated book to produce because the print version has a lot of unusual formatting. We produced DAISY 2, DAISY 3, and e-text formats. We also have the original publisher's PDF file for comparison.

How did we do? What do you notice that's different between the formats? Please tell us what software you're using to read, and anything you notice that's worth a comment. Especially interested in little annoying things that you're not sure if you should mention.

Thank you for your time. Your feedback will help us understand what we can do better.

This is a great book, by the way. I loved this book when I read it. Just loved it. It's full of stories.

Sabina
Last edited by Sabina on Tue Feb 06, 2018 8:05 am, edited 3 times in total.
Sabina Iseli-Otto at NNELS
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Re: Generation X

Post by
Daniella.LP
»
Tue Feb 06, 2018 4:30 am
Do we need a URL to find that folder in Dropbox? The general URL posted in the introduction forum works, but I could not find folders. Any guidance would be appreciated. Thanks.
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Re: Generation X

Post by
Sabina
»
Tue Feb 06, 2018 5:20 am
Sorry about that. It should be there, now.
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Re: Generation X

Post by
Sabina
»
Tue Feb 06, 2018 8:06 am
And we've removed the Dropbox link in favour of you downloading books directly from NNELS.
Sabina Iseli-Otto at NNELS
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Re: Generation X

Post by
rmarion
»
Tue Feb 06, 2018 4:55 pm
Hello Sabina and all. Today I spent most of my time looking at the 2 books you posted to us this morning. I had a chance to review the structure with 2 apps and my daisy book player.

First I tried Generation X with the Voice Dream app. In both versions of the book, the app would not play the audio files from the book. It would only load the text file and play it with the speech included with the app. All the headings were visible as well. I am not sure if the book has marked pages as they were not visible in any playback method. Then I tried the daisy 2.2 version using my daisy player. It was able to load the audio and I could navigate the book by headings at both levels of the headings. Finally, I tried using the Dolphin Easyreader App. In this case, the app loaded the audio but not the text. All the headings were visible and I could navigate by heading.

I did load the second book into my daisy player to see if it worked as well. It did and I was able to navigate the book. Also, when trying it with Voice dream reader, it also only loaded the text without the audio files. Finally, with the second book, I did import the ePub file into iBooks. I will let you know how it works there in another note.
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Re: Generation X

Post by
Sabina
»
Wed Feb 07, 2018 5:48 am
Richard, thank you for your feedback so far. It seems Voice Dream Reader has a funny way of sometimes dumping the audio for the text, and sometimes dumping the text for the audio. We've also noticed that this app doesn't recognize headings in text documents, which can make navigation difficult.

We don't usually have marked pages for the fiction books we produce, but I'll let someone who knows more about our production workflow comment on that. Thanks again.
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Re: Generation X

Post by
farrah
»
Wed Feb 07, 2018 9:18 am
Thanks Richard for testing this book out.

In regards to page markers, most of our books don't contain them. This is because we work from electronic publisher files (mainly reflowable EPUB files) which do not contain page markers. Many publishers, especially of fiction books, don't insert the corresponding print pagination into the ebook version of their book. According to the EPUB specification, they should be doing this, and I'm hoping we can encourage them to do so!

Do you find that the lack of pagination presents navigation issues?
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Re: Generation X

Post by
rmarion
»
Wed Feb 07, 2018 9:29 am
Hello. Not having pagenation is not a big deal. I just wasn't sure if the file had it in the first place since the various apps and devices I tried played the file differently. I would agree that for the most part in fiction books you may not be looking for a specific page.
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Re: Generation X

Post by
ka.li
»
Wed Feb 07, 2018 11:15 am
pagenation isn't a big deal if you're reading it for leisure but it could be an inconvenience if this book were to be used in a university or high school setting such as in a literature course.
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Re: Generation X

Post by
Sabina
»
Wed Feb 07, 2018 11:35 am
Because our audience is the public library community rather than an academic one, we produce most of our books for leisure reading. Sometimes we produce books for people doing research who request pagination, but we usually leave it out unless it's requested because it's so much work.
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