Book People Archive

Re: new stuff up

For bowerbird's Secret Garden demo
(http://www.greatamericannovel.com/sgfhb/sgfhbc001.html),
I'm getting displays that don't seem to match the shorthand options:

[Moderator: Below is my stab at converting what was originally
 HTML to plain text for posting on this list. Each link's URL is on the left,
 and the label on the the right.  At this writing, you may see
 slightly different links for the URL above, but I do still see some behavior
 similar to what's described further down. - JMO]

http://www.greatamericannovel.com/sgfhb/sgfhbp102w.html  p102/p103
http://www.greatamericannovel.com/sgfhb/sgfhbp097w.html  -chap-
http://www.greatamericannovel.com/sgfhb/sgfhbc-1.html    toc-1 
http://www.greatamericannovel.com/sgfhb/sgfhbp104.html   p104
http://www.greatamericannovel.com/sgfhb/sgfhbp105.html   p105
http://www.greatamericannovel.com/sgfhb/sgfhbc-2.html    toc-2 
http://www.greatamericannovel.com/sgfhb/sgfhbp111w.html  +chap+ 
http://www.greatamericannovel.com/sgfhb/sgfhbp106w.html  p106/p107

Eg, once I got two copies of the front cover, side by side and
otherwise I wasn't either what to expect or what might be possible
among display options.

I guess this reminds me to say that, as a user of online books for
research purposes (I still prefer hardcopy for pleasure reading), the
interfaces aren't standardized enough.  Neither is the basic
terminology: "online book", "electronic book", "etext", "digitized
book", "OCR", whatever and etcetera.

It would be good to develop basic terms that are oriented toward the
user experience, expectations, and desires rather than the process(es)
used for developing the book or the display software.  Eg, for one
aspect of the user experience, "page image" or "page facsimile" would
describe what he wants to, and will, see; for another, "search rough
text" indicates the likelihood of faulty OCR'd text while "search
proofread text" or "search research-quality text" would indicate a
higher quality text.

A number of these terms would be along a spectrum--for, say, quality of
search-database text, or visual quality of page image (for reading
purposes).  Thus the humans who do the cataloging should also use their
judgment in evaluating a book that would, essentially, specify the
terms that would appear when a user gets to the gateway for that book
(whether that is hyperlinked catalog card, or hot TOC, or title page,
or...).

Even with a set of basic terms, elaboration would be necessary. For
example:

Huckleberry Finn, _Mark Twain: A Novel_ (1890):
   -- smallscreen reading copy: iPod file (3MB) in English , French, or
       Spanish, at Bookpeople...
   -- research-quality searchable etext: chapter by chapter at
       UC-Berkeley...
   -- document facsimile of 1890 first edition:  high-resolution color
       PDF (2GB) at NYPL...
   -- etc.

Cheers,
Al Magary