Date: Tue, 19 Jan 2010 11:54:17 -0600 Message-ID: <eeea499a1001190954k7c9e9831q28a3bb17173b1629@mail.gmail.com> Subject: Sharing out of print local history books on Google Books From: Russell Hanson <riverroadrambler@gmail.com>
We Googlized two of our out-of-print local history books and a booklet to
make them available to everyone in the whole world for free!! Check them
out at
http://books.google.com/books?id=bwhLB0o_kXcC&dq=stories+of+the+trade+river+valley&source=gbs_navlinks_s
http://books.google.com/books?id=7EQV1CQ2uSMC&dq=stories+of+the+st+croix+river+road&source=gbs_navlinks_s
<http://books.google.com/books?id=7EQV1CQ2uSMC&dq=stories+of+the+st+croix+river+road&source=gbs_navlinks_s>
http://books.google.com/books?id=Gns8EScnF5sC&source=gbs_navlinks_s
We originally printed and sold these books, but ran out of them and
don't really want to print another group. We are sharing them through the
google book partners program. We chose to put the whole book online and let
anyone read it for free. There are options to share parts of the book and
point to link where they are sold and in the future we could sell the online
reading for a fee; however as the books are out of print with the costs
already recovered, we chose this route to make them more available to
history researchers. The books did not have ISBN and were locally printed
and self published. Originally they cost about $8 each for printing 300
copies and we sold them for $15 each.
We signed up for the free Google partners program and then uploaded the
same pdf file that we sent to the book printer, entered a few details and
to make them appear on Google. They are now searchable by word; have a US
map showing the locations mentioned in the book and other fun features. We
could sign up to get money per advertiser click appearing on the viewing
pages, but thought the viewing audience would be too small to bother with
this.
If we would have had only the printed book, we could have mailed it to
Google and they would have scanned it, did the optical character recognition
and put the book online -- all free for us and again let us choose to show
all or part or none; point to a link to sell the book; and get advertising
or reading money back. This is a wonderful way to take old local history
books and get them back into circulation! FREE!
With the new book we have coming out this spring, we plan to put the book
online with a 20% viewable level and point to a link for book sales as one
of our avenues of selling it. We just have to have our own web page that
tells you how to buy the book by mail order from us. Amazing stuff that
Google is doing. One negative might be that the Chinese will be blocked
from reading Stories of the St. Croix River Valley if Google does pull
out!!!
Russ Hanson Sterling Eureka and Laketown Historical Society Polk Co WI