Message-ID: <87747F001154438EAC355E993D79315C@57ec9f016a0c4fb> From: "Marcie Braski" <cen95870@centurytel.net> Subject: Re: Sharing out of print local history books on Google Books Date: Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:55:25 -0600
In this vein, I would like to know how to handle or the disposition of
very old books. Is there any value to book collectors? These are not
local books. I have read many of them and are very interesting and
heavily Britsh using pounds for currency. These are books published
from 1890 thru 1920. What have other museums done with them?
Marcella A Braski, Pres.
Knox Creek Heritage Ctr
Brantwood WI
----- Original Message -----
From: Russell Hanson
To: localhistory
Sent: Tuesday, January 19, 2010 11:54 AM
Subject: Sharing out of print local history books on Google Books
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+cr
oix+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