Our sincere thanks to Neil Bernstein, of the NLS Download Project for permission to make his recent post to the NLS Download list available here.
I would like to clear up some of the misinformation that's going around regarding older books.
NLS has been recording books digitally since 2002 and making DTBs of every single book we produce since 2004. This is the reason you see a preponderance of recent books in the downloadable collection. It's simply that they're already done and needed only some processing and a last quality check before we could put them up for download.
However, that doesn't mean we're disregarding older books. A few years back, the NLS Collection Development section chose 10,000 titles from before 2004 to be converted from their analog master tapes into digital talking books (or, for books from 2002 and 2003, from simple digital recordings into full DTBs). The process of converting these titles is underway, and you can already download over a thousand such books.
Among those books you'll already find some narrated by Alexander Scourby and other great readers. Everyone has different favorites.
However, NLS does not plan to lower its standards in order to make older readings of given titles available. If the analog master tape for a book is simply not in good enough shape to be used to create a digital talking book that meets current NLS standards, the book will not be converted at this time. But nothing is being "trashed," and nothing is "lost and gone forever." When time and money permit, NLS will make a special effort to restore these titles, which will then be converted to DTBs and made available. That effort will not begin until after the first set of conversion books is done.
As with all endeavors, this is an issue of time and money. Great expense could be taken to restore and clean up some of the older master tapes, but that would mean fewer books could be made available now. NLS is doing its best to balance the desire to make available as many books in digital format as it can with the desire to make sure certain older recordings are included in the digital library.
Neil Return To Victor Reader Stream and NLS Download Project InformationCreated on ... October 10, 2007