On Aug 13, 2011, at 12:13 PM, Jim Adcock wrote:
Not to defend that which Google is doing or not doing, but to point out a "correction" -- not all the books in google library are simply scanned images bundled into a "pretty looking pdf file." On the left side of the google books page that displays a book you have clicked through on because you think you are interested in that book is a tab choice labeled "Read on Your Device." About half the books I see there have the option "eReaders and other devices" which will have the choice you described earlier namely "Download PDF" which indeed is simply a bundle of pretty pictures -- bitmap representations of "Xerox Copies" of each page in the book. But the other option is sometimes "Download EPUB" -- which still has the problem that introductory pages, table of contents continue to only be represented as bitmap "pretty pictures", but the body text has been automagically Optical Character Recognized and converted to electronic text form, which screen readers can hopefully handle -- especially since one can get ePub plug-ins to allow one to read ePub format directly in several common web browsers -- and modern screen readers had better be able to handle modern web browsers.
Heh. Yeah, they sure can. (well, most of them) However, I generally find it easier (until recently, I didn't have a device that could handle epub books) simply to extract the contents of the epub book, and read the html thereby revealed in my regular web browser. It works a treat, and doesn't require me to do anything to make it accessible. :) I wasn't aware google books were available in epub formats. I'll take another look then, and see if there's epub versions next time I perform a search and they turn up. Thanks for that info.