Let me add that if you concentrate on the obscure you might be surprised at what you have been missing. I mentioned Vantage Press for example. They do not employ editors to read and select manuscripts. They do not market books after they publish them. It is just a matter of an author submitting a book to them and they print it up for a fee. They don't make their money by selling books. They make their money by charging authors for publishing their works. The books are then delivered to the author in the number that he ordered and it is up to him to sell them. Needless to say, this is not the road to best-sellerhood. Many of the books are poorly written, but they are not necessarily so. The authors must have some amount of self confidence to even try and if they have self confidence it must be based on something. It might be just a matter of being overlooked by more prestigious publishers because of being lost in the shuffle. Let's face it, there are a lot of would be writers out there and it is hard to stand out in the crowd even if one has a reason to stand out. Once the authors get the books they ordered they are likely to not know much about marketing them. Can you imagine just walking into a bookstore and asking them to carry your book? My point is that you can't get much more obscure than those kind of books and it is not a foregone conclusion that they are not worth bothering with. You just might find a treasure that virtually no one else knows about. Remember, for example, that one of the most popular books in the Bookshare collection, An Involuntary King, is published by Booksurge. That is, it is self published.
_ _ _"Socialism can be built only by free men and women working together to lay the foundations for a new society and transforming themselves in the process." - Ernesto "Che" Guevara
The Militant: http://www.themilitant.com Pathfinder Press: http://www.pathfinderpress.com Granma International: http://www.granma.cu/ingles/index.html----- Original Message ----- From: "Judy s." <cherryjam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Tuesday, July 27, 2010 1:47 AM Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Hopefully my last post on volunteers VS pq I have to agree with Courtney and Roger. I really do appreciate the frustration others are feeling, but I guess I'm coming from a different place. I just took a look in Wikipedia. According to UNESCO, between the United States and the United Kingdom, 378,000 book titles are published in English each and every year. The books entering into the collection from publishers include several years worth of titles for each publisher. But even if they represented only one year of titles, and if Bookshare adds 10,000 publisher quality books every single month in a year, that leaves 266,000 titles printed in English each and every year that publishers aren't submitting that a volunteer can add. Add on top of that all the interesting and well-written out-of-print books (and there are literally millions of titles like that), and us volunteers really have a pretty big smorgasbord of books we can choose from to add. I don't like any more than anyone else having to go through the convolutions we're doing currently to figure out which publishers are submitting books, which aren't, and what books the outsourcers are working on. That whole process needs a major fix, because it's a royal pain in the rump for us volunteers. But overall, I see us volunteers as having to avoid only a limited subset of books that are published, because they are going to enter the collection as publishers quality, in the bigger scheme of things. But that's just my opinion and way of looking at it. smile. Judy s. Quoting Courtney Stover <liamskitten@xxxxxxxxx>:
Hi All: I can understand the frustration of having your books replaced by PQ books; the first series I ever scanned has just been replaced. However, I think that in our anger, we're sometimes missing the bigger picture. There've been over nine thousand books added to the collection in a month! And all of the PQ books I've downloaded, aside from missing page breaks, have been practically flawless. It's amazing to realize that large numbers of books will continue to flow in to the collection via outsourcers and publishers as well as volunteers. We're gaining so much so quickly it makes my head spin. Realistically, there's no way volunteers could add books alone with the speed/frequency they're being added now. And that in no way is meant to demean volunteers; it's merely a statement of fact. However, while there're newer books coming in at a dizzying speed, Roger's right; there're so many older/special interest books volunteers can provide; that's where I'll be shifting my efforts, and I hope others will, too. Just my two cents, Courtney On 7/27/10, Denise Thompson <deniset@xxxxxxx> wrote:-----Original Message----- From: Andy B. Sent: 07/26/2010, 9:42 PM To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Hopefully my last post on volunteers VS pqi would have to agree. I have no interest in scanning for the sake of it. If bookshare has grown beyond us isn't that really the way it should be? After all we want the time to come when all publishers will automatically submittheir books for electronic conversion. It's difficult when in a way we'renow getting what we've hoped for and what many of us have fought for, but wemay have to celebrate our accomplishments, keep fine tuning and take upanother cause of our choice. Downinloading and listening to books as we go.How many people get to say they worked themselves out of a job in their lifetime. DeniseOur job shouldn't be to find the most funky out of date and most left behind books possible. It should be to find a book we think someone else would wantto read and send it along. The first one just makes the volunteer network sound like it is desperately trying to hang on until it gets snuffed out somehow. I'm sure that's not what we are here for. -----Original Message----- From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx[mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Roger Loran BaileySent: Monday, July 26, 2010 10:39 PM To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Hopefully my last post on volunteers VS pqAs I have mentioned before, what with outsourcers and publisher submissionsthe volunteer contributed books in the collection is now a small minority and shrinking. That does not mean, though, that there is no role for volunteers at all anymore. It is just necessary to shift niches. That is,again, long out of print books, small presses, vanity presses and the mostobscure books that you can find. _ _ _"Socialism can be built only by free men and women working together to laythe foundations for a new society and transforming themselves in the process." - Ernesto "Che" Guevara The Militant: http://www.themilitant.com Pathfinder Press: http://www.pathfinderpress.com Granma International: http://www.granma.cu/ingles/index.html ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Lumpkin" <llumpkin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Monday, July 26, 2010 10:16 PM Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Hopefully my last post on volunteers VS pqIf bookshare values the scanning and proofing of books by volunteers. Tell us how? In what way? If we are to scan and proof books for the collection,which books? Someone sends me a box of books to add to the collection butI am decidedly NOT going to scan them only to find that my scanning and possibly the proofing of my wife who spends sometimes days on a book reading it from cover to cover will be dumped in the bit bucket because of a PQ submission which is often inferior to our efforts. I'm sorry, but the answers provided by bookshare staff concerning this issue have not been satisfactory. The solution we are being offered is, "well, go ahead andscan and proof away and good luck." As you can tell, I am decidedly nothappy.To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxxput the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list ofavailable commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line. To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxxput the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. 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