My CELA (Centre for equitable Library Access) Canada just started using Bookstore a few months ago, and I have missed the manually transcribed Braille, however I love that they now have a vastly expanded collection, and they have most of their Braille books available in Braille or electronic Braille, or Word/Epub.

I've been doing a lot of proofreading lately and it's been interesting figuring out some of the errors that I find. One common one seems to be mistaking "I" and "1" for each other, but beyond that I had an interesting one the other day. It was a recipe book with 1/4 in it, but in the braille it had a single opening quotation mark and a capital A. Took me a bit to figure it read the tiny 1 at the top as an single quote and thought the 4 was an "A". Somehow it missed the slash, I suppose.

There are definitely places that will transcribe books. It's something I'm getting into myself. But, as the other poster said, it would cost a lot. It can be a very time consuming process.

Getting books manually transcribed for you would cost a lot of money. If this is something you really wanted and didn't mind putting a bit of effort in yourself, you could buy the Duxbury Braille Translator (the software professional transcribers use) or BrailleBlaster (a free alternative that's only for the US and Canada) which has far fewer features) and do it yourself.

I've personally found the .brf files Bookshare generates to be of an acceptable standard. The biggest problem is it not knowing if the text at the top of a new page is a new paragraph or a continuation of the paragraph from the previous page. It doesn't matter to me how many formatting errors there are because I generally only read books once (there are so many, so why would I waste time rereading when I might find something better?).

The quality is going to vary a lot both for automatic and manual transcription depending on the source material, transcriber and transcription tools. What you are asking for is equivalent to asking for hand set type printing so it is not going to be cheap or quick. With perfect inputs and properly configured transcription software a transcriber could produce quality output mostly automatically. If the transcriber is instead starting with an OCR scanned document with recognition errors, without chapter or paragraph breaks, carriage returns at the end of every line, spaces for indentation, etc. then there is going to be a lot of work needed to make the result better than complete crap. That cleanup formatting work is expensive and time consuming whether the end result is to be print or braille.