Message-ID: <C158EA3DB6494A2BBCF8B9A400D7B46B@BOBBIE> From: "Lee Erdmann" <lerdmann@centurytel.net> Subject: Re: Sharing out of print local history books on Google Books Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 10:38:03 -0600
Thank you for sending this information. I just published a book last
fall and was considering posting it on Google Books. It is nice to be
able to read about someone else's experience with that. I self-published
my book and after reading your posts I have decided to go forward with
also posting my book with them.
Appreciate you taking the time to do this.
Bobbie Erdmann
Berlin Area Historical Society
----- Original Message -----
From: Russell Hanson
To: localhistory
Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2010 12:21 PM
Subject: Re: Sharing out of print local history books on Google Books
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+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