no cops no mines

ANTI-RACIST RESOURCES docs.google.com/document/d/1cY…

@becimay youtube.com/watch?v=w4ZP49…

Keep thinking of this example from Marx: of the piano-maker and pianist, he says, only the piano-maker is ‘productive’, while the pianist’s playing is no more ‘productive’ than ‘the delusions of a madman’. Yet without being played, the piano is junk. Are we pianists in the arts?

@decoratedshed genuinely, I look forward to the new epub format being mandated by the ADA and international equivalents so publishers and info. profs. can provide accessible copy complete with the fixed layout metadata. I'm sorry somehow this turned about me being ignorant and uncurious

@RedThunderAudio I didn’t say that and I don’t think that. but we’re both info professionals right? I struggle when info professionals are uncurious or ignorant about the building blocks of libraries & archives, which are labors necessary & performed every day by some of us, but not all of us

libby also kinda sucks compared even to some other proprietary bloodsucking platforms meanwhile the communists are only circulating pdfs, like sociopaths

@decoratedshed I don't think you're engaging with my comment but I'm glad to hear of these changes, which seem perfectly appropriate for the context in which they're happening

@RedThunderAudio I work at a public college and we’re instructed not to use PDFs for non-print material because we know this. in the US we’re preparing for the ADA updates next year which will mandate tagged pdfs and has huge implications for archives (for good imo)

@decoratedshed I don't think asking you what the issues are with pdf to epub conversion when the OCR is done properly is ableist but if that's what you think I appreciate your feedback and will take that to heart / look for that information elsewhere

@RedThunderAudio yes there are issues! Information isn’t all analogous to the visual. Everything you’re looking at has a structure, and i feel like as an info professional i should try to understand those rather than find less functional workarounds to fit my biases and comfort

@decoratedshed are there issues when you convert it to epub or txt

@RedThunderAudio this is the PDF i have most recently put on my phone to look at. it’s beautiful, doesn’t use OCR because it’s a digital doc and not an image, searchable, and totally unusable if you use any kind of accessibility tech

@decoratedshed there's still issues with regards to making archival-grade digital copy accessible to vision impaired scholars and readers but that's also a separate problem

@decoratedshed I'm sorry, I checked and since the last time I'd looked, Epub 3.3 has added fixed layout mechanisms that can preserve pagination information #sec-fixed-layouts" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">w3.org/TR/epub-33/#se… that's my bad. in my experience most publishers still do not provide that information but that's a separate pblm

@decoratedshed if it is in fact a book I made a scan for, I'll gladly fix the OCR and convert it to epub

@decoratedshed that being said I love seeing a ~200mb pdf with blurry pages and fucked up OCR. I've made a few myself, and might be responsible for the communist book that upset you. in which case I am genuinely sorry

@decoratedshed so do I? I'm sorry, I'm not trying to argue with you. I'm saying academic readers read whole books too and epub and other proprietary ebook formats are (intentionally, I suspect) not appropriately designed for extensive referential use. I'm not trying to critique what you do

@RedThunderAudio I’m not talking about academic readers, I agree this is a convenience problem for academic readers (it’s similar to why i don’t love audiobooks), but even in that case there are established information strategies academic readers can do. i read whole books!

@decoratedshed Some books I can't get as pdfs, I can only get as ebooks (I have a ~200?). I don't love having to use an ebook, but I have used them and would have saved you this conversation if I didn't feel like I had a meaningful experience with the thing you were discussing

@RedThunderAudio Then it sounds like you are not a user of ebooks in particular, but these users exist

@decoratedshed most academic readers need to be able to know what page number the text is from. I agree it's not as big a number of people as non-academic readers! but I don't think it's a negligible number

@RedThunderAudio I don’t believe this is true for most readers or what the function is of reading. I think even if it’s still marginal compared to print, their share is important enough as accessibility tools, which is always going to be a marginal use case that still matters

@decoratedshed actually it was an ipod touch, because I did not have a smartphone until 2014. I will never do that again. I do scan books with my phone though

@decoratedshed the only book I've ever read on my phone is Dracula, because I was incredibly bored at a new year's party in 2009

@decoratedshed so you're asking me how I read pdfs of books?

@RedThunderAudio like i’m currently sitting down and reading a book, from start to finish. this week I’m reading two books digitally (one fiction in french, one nonfiction in english). I have them on my phone but read them for fairly large stretches of time throughout the day.

@decoratedshed I'm sorry I don't know what this means

@RedThunderAudio yes, but how do you read a book? do you read a pdf as a book?

@decoratedshed if an epub can't do page numbers it's failed as an access format. maybe not for most uses but for a meaningful portion of them it has. They're both failed formats

@RedThunderAudio Which is the point: pdf today isn’t an access format, it’s a printing format, there’s not much it can do for reading that an epub can’t do, but tons it can’t do that is necessary for accessibility, which is part of why it’s considered one of the least accessible formats.