Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:21:54 -0600 Message-ID: <eeea499a1001211021s730fbc9fwf232984b9c17eb63@mail.gmail.com> Subject: Re: Sharing out of print local history books on Google Books From: Russell Hanson <riverroadrambler@gmail.com>
I sent the first email in this series out on Jan 19th at about noon. Google
Books partner program shows me 39 different folks went to one of the books;
25 looked into the books and looked at a total of 805 pages later that day!.
Google does not keep track of who looked, just the count of distinct
visitors per book and pages viewed and advertisements clicked and the
dollars earned (I don't have advertising turned on so no money coming in).
I will guess that most of them are from the localhistory list group of you
who took a look. If you did, what do you think of it?
My next test is taking an out-of-print book from 30 years ago that was
produced in limited quantities and has no computer file with the contents.
Google has you generate a mailing label and fill out a little information,
mail the book to them and it will be scanned, digitized, turned to a
searchable pdf and put online in my partner group of books where it will be
"forever" available to the public (or at least as long as I choose to allow
it there).
I am thinking about turning on the advertising revenue setup where you get
paid everytime a book reader clicks on an advertisement that google places
on the page based on topics or locations in the book. For instance, a
sawmill ad showed up on one book where I had a story about sawmills and
Wisconsin. To make money, I think I will have to put in some articles on
food, lingerie, medicine, etc!!
The process for a file sent to google to appear online is about 3 days from
when I send it. I don't know how long the mail in books will take. I will
try that tomorrow. One of the benefits is, even if I chose to only put 10%
of the book viewable to the public, I will get a pdf file of the whole
scanned book so that I could use it to print out my own paper copy or
possibly send it to a printer for printing new copies of the whole book
--FREE!!!
Russ Hanson
Polk County Wisconsin
Luck Area Historical Society and Sterling Eureka and Laketown Historical
Society, Polk Co Genealogical Society, Polk Co History Society (and a few
more!).
On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 11:54 AM, Russell Hanson <riverroadrambler@gmail.com
> wrote:
> 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
>