Comments on: Can we help out Mark Gladding with DAISY ebooks?

By: ReadHowYouWant

ReadHowYouWant — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:03:10 +0000

ReadHowYouWant is launching a second, brand new DAISY program today as well. PLEXTALK is partnering with RHYW to give away 5 full length DAISY files of classic titles each month. November’s titles include The Art of War, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. These titles can be downloaded each month at http://www.readhowyouwant.com/plextalk.

By: ReadHowYouWant

ReadHowYouWant — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:55:38 +0000

ReadHowYouWant offers a number of DAISY downloads for free, including the first chapter of 20 new titles each month as part of our Free Chapter Download Program. You can download the November chapters at http://www.readhowyouwant.com/humanware.

A number of full length DAISY files are available at the link Varju mentioned, http://www.readhowyouwant.com/braille.

Thanks!

By: Mark Gladding

Mark Gladding — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:01:58 +0000

Firstly, thanks Paul for relaying my request for help.

Thank you so much Varju and Daniel for the excellent links. I’ve a lot more DAISY ebooks to test now.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:33:14 +0000

There are quite a few DTBOOKs / DAISY 3 books here too:

http://www.cucat.org/library/openbiblio/opac/index.php

http://www.cucat.org/books/scriptures/scriptures.php

Regards, Daniel

By: Varju Luceno

Varju Luceno — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:25:26 +0000

I know some DAISY related terminology can be confusing, therefore I will give a quick overview:
“DAISY 3″ is the short name of the ANSI/NISO Z39.86 standard released in 2002, revised in 2005, currently the most recent version of the DAISY Standard. The former version is DAISY 2.02 and there is an ongoing revision called DAISY 4 (also known as DAISY Next or ZedNext).

“DTBook” = “DAISY XML”: it is an XML document representing the textual content of a DAISY book. It is a custom XML grammar with book-specific markup (e.g. there are elements for frontmatter, page, footnote, poem, etc). See the normative DTD schema for more information. The DTBook grammar is part of the DAISY 3 specification: a DAISY 3 book with textual content will contain a DTBook document ; however all DAISY 3 books do not have a DTBook (an audio-only DAISY book has no textual content, hence no DTBook).

“DTB” = “Digital Talking Book” = “DAISY Book” is the entire file set representing the book. It can be composed of textual content, audio files, synchronization files, navigation control files, etc. Their composition depends on the type of the book (e.g. audio-only, full-text full-audio, text-only, etc.) and also on the version of the standard (a DAISY 2.02 DTB is different from a DAISY 3 DTB).

Samples of DAISY books:
DAISY Consortium website
http://www.daisy.org/z3986/samples/

gh, LLC has posted sample books in DAISY 3 format, you can also download a free trial of a DAISY Player
http://www.gh-accessibility.com/store/download.php

Publications in DAISY and EPUB formats plus a free trial of a DAISY Player on the Dolphin Computer Access website
http://www.yourdolphin.com/dolphin.asp?id=372

The Internet Archive (text-only DAISY)
http://www.archive.org/details/daisynichol02hardgoog

Offering DAISY books to their qualified members:

Bookshare (text-only DAISY)
http://www.bookshare.org
RFB&D (human narrated DAISY)
http://www.rfbd.org

Other sources:
RNIB
http://onlineshop.rnib.org.uk/browse.asp?n=11&c=478&sc=0&it=2&l=2
ReadHowYouWant
http://www.readhowyouwant.com/braille/

By: Jean K

Jean K — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:27:54 +0000

I don’t know how many publishers would actually have the actual source code out on the web, and DTBook is essentially the source code for the text that goes into a DAISY book…

You might try talking to some of the K-12 text book publishers. There are mandates for these publishers to provide DAISY books in some states (Texas, I think?), so you might have better luck getting some samples from them, if you can give them a business reason to use your product.

Hope this helps.