I focused on scanning Indy books myself for a while. Then there was a
neighbor who went to one of those friends of libraries sales and got an
enormous number of books for a price that worked out to less than a
nickel a book. I was allowed to sort through them and I simply did a
search for each of them on Bookshare and picked out the ones that were
not there. These were enough books that they have kept me busy for quite
some time now, over a year for sure, but I'm not really sure exactly how
long. Every time I finish one and pick out another I do another search
to find out if it has been added to Bookshare while it was waiting for
me. So far none have. Furthermore, as far as I know none of them have
been replaced by a publisher copy yet either and I know for sure that a
number of the books I have scanned from this pile are published by
publishers that do contribute to Bookshare. Maybe I have just gotten
lucky. But for a long time now my only criterion for what I scan for
Bookshare is simply that Bookshare does not already have it. Right now
my scanning is on hiatus. I had several books rejected because for
whatever reason my text recognition program stopped including paragraph
breaks and I wanted to get that problem resolved before I start work on
a new book. But once I do get started again I don't have all that many
books left from that library sale pile to go and once I finish them I am
likely to go back to scanning Indy books. Just aside from trying to pick
out books that will not be replaced I also want to encourage Indy
writers. The way I found them before was, first, to familiarize myself
with the names of some Indy publishers. These publishers aren't really
much more than printers. That is, the author pays them to print up so
many copies of his or her book and they may go as far as to get an ISBN
for the book, but that is about as far as they go before they deliver
the finished product and then leave it up to the author to market the
books. However, these Indy publishers do have names. A couple that come
to mind off hand are Vantage and Booksurge. Then there are the so-called
small presses. Those are not necessarily just printers, but they are
small enough that they do not have many resources and they tend to leave
the authors on their own too simply because they may not be able to
afford a marketing department. Right on the spot no names of those small
presses come to my mind although I used to have a fairly long list of
them in my mind. There are directories of small and independent presses
out there though. You might want to Google around for them. Once I had
the names of these Indy and small publishers in mind I would then go to
PaperbackSwap.com and follow the link to their advanced search. There
you can enter a name into the publisher field and do a search for that
specific publisher. I have an account at that web site and can order any
books that may turn up that are available. Availability varies and it is
good to check back regularly. Also, here is something I did at least
once. I went to Amazon and searched for the word author in the publisher
field of their advanced search and got a lot of books that were labeled
published by the author. I never ordered any of those because I found
PaperbackSwap.com to be the cheaper source, but that might be a place to
find the titles of author published books that could be looked up
elsewhere or ordered from Amazon. The trouble is that I did that same
thing again another time and I did not get that long list of author
published books. It is possible that I might have done something wrong,
though, like made a typo. It was just something I did while killing
time, but I hope this might give you some ideas about how to find Indy
books.
___
Sam Harris
“Are you really surprised by the endurance of religion? What ideology is likely
to be more durable than one that conforms, at every turn, to our powers of
wishful thinking? Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in
which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases
and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a
refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has
good reason to believe. The methodology isn't perfect, and the history of
science is riddled with abject failures of scientific objectivity. But that is
just the point-these have been failures of science, discovered and corrected
by-what, religion? No, by good science.”
― Sam Harris
On 11/30/2020 12:45 AM, Scott..blanks wrote:
Hello again listers,To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to
Here's another in my series of getting reacquainted with Bookshare questions.
I know generally what I will be scanning. Books will largely be fiction and
from the horror genre. However, I'd like to learn the current approach of the
Bookshare team in regards to partnerships with different publishers. I'd prefer
to scan books into the collection that won't be quickly replaced by superior
copies direct from the publishing houses with whom Bookshare has active
relationships. I am fairly confident I can identify titles which will not be
likely to fall into this category by focusing on indie work. There are a lot of
titles out there. All that said, any guidance would be happily accepted. I took
a quick tour around the volunteer page on the site, but much of that data
appears to be unchanged. I figure this list will probably yield the most
current scoop.
Thanks,
Scott
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