Books you gave up on ever being ebooks

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by shalym

Ok, so that's your rationale. For me, all I really care about is the words. Then again, I'm one who always would have rather read the paperback than the hard cover...mostly because I could fit it into my purse or my pocket. Portability has *always* been more important than how pretty it looks, to me. Of course, these days it actually causes *pain* to hold a hardcover book for too long, but that wasn't as much of a consideration back in the day.

Shari

That's fair. A lot of people feel that way. Back in the early days of ebooks, most ebooks were like that. To a great extent, I'm not nearly as picky as that sounds, as I said, any ebook is better than no ebook.

On the other hand, I've started to notice some of the better done ebooks over the last couple of years and their is a big difference. Take a look at one of the latest versions of the original Harry Potter books. Really sharp looking and it shows that it understands that ebook really has different capabilities than paper books. Some of the books that use footnotes do a real good job of linking to the footnote and back.

I think that ebooks are starting to enter into a phase like Web pages did, where people are starting to explore what the different possibilities are. Anyone can generate a web page, but it takes talent and effort to generate a really nice web page. The flip side is that there are still some really, really bad web pages out there.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

The flip side is that there are still some really, really bad web pages out there.

LOL, I have visions of some old Geocities websites I used to visit flashing through my head.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

LOL, I have visions of some old Geocities websites I used to visit flashing through my head.

There is that. I was actually thinking of some commercial web sites though. Fry's looks like a copy of their newspaper ads. I guess someone made a conscience decision to do that.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Fry's looks like a copy of their newspaper ads. I guess someone made a conscience decision to do that.

If it's not hastily put together and semi-shady looking, it's missing the Fry's charm

[nabsltd]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

When I compare the fan generated Jack of Shadows with the professionally done version that I got via Amazon, there is a big difference. As I said, the fan version doesn't have any noticeable typos and the words are all there, but the formatting is off. It's just not as aesthetically pleasing as the Amazon version. Looking at the paper version, it's not all that aesthetically pleasing either. There isn't nearly enough white space. I assume they were trying to save paper.

"Enough white space" is a personal preference that will vary for every person.

That said, a correctly formatted EPUB will allow the user enough control over such things as space between individual lines, space between paragraphs, margins, etc., that no one will complain about "enough" (or "too much") white space. Sometimes that control will require a custom CSS file, but often the reader software will have settings that take care of it for less computer-literate people.

I suspect the "professionally" done version of the book forces a look that just happened to match what you prefer, but for people who don't like that look, their only choice is to edit the book to make it more flexible. On the other hand, it's likely the fan-created version also forces a look...but you just don't happen to like that one, while other people will. It would take me about an hour to fix the CSS in either version so that a user who has set up their reader software to match their preferences will like the end result, regardless of which one they liked best beforehand.

[ZodWallop]

Anyone know why Dennis McKiernan's early Mithgar books are unavailable? He seems to have a following. I'm surprised they aren't already available.

Those sort of books aren't really my bag, but when I heard the Iron Tower was essentially a rewrite of Lord of the Rings, it piqued my curiosity.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Anyone know why Dennis McKiernan's early Mithgar books are unavailable? He seems to have a following. I'm surprised they aren't already available.

Those sort of books aren't really my bag, but when I heard the Iron Tower was essentially a rewrite of Lord of the Rings, it piqued my curiosity.

Bless you. An on-topic post!

[bgalbrecht]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

I find that odd formatting is the rule rather than the exception in books that I'm interested in scanning. The last book I scanned used a two column format. That took a long time to get right. Old paperbacks where the ink has blurred a bit and the paper has turned brown due to the paper used and age tend to have more scan errors that hardback books. I also find that the books I'm interested in scanning tend to be rather longer than the old 200 page pulp novels.

Do you scan 500+ ebooks a year? That's what we are actually talking about. A commercial ebook scanner that scans and edits ebooks day in and day out, not someone who does it on an occasional basis for fun. There are a number of people on this board who scan and edit books for fun. Perhaps some will chime in and say how long it takes them. I'm probably one of the slower workers here. I might be able to scan 10 pages in a hour and generate decent text, but it won't be formatted or proofed.

I'm not a professional, but I've scanned a number of ebooks for Distributed Proofreaders. A first pass at Jack of Shadows took me about an hour, but I expect that a second pass in Sigil to make me most mostly happy would take at least an hour more. But, as you noted, Jack of Shadows is a fairly short book. My guess is that a longer work, like Lord of Light, probably will take at least 8 hours. And I'm being lazy and assuming that I can spot most of the scan errors by just eyeballing the results. If I were doing this professionally, I'd probably do stuff like scan for common scannos, generate word lists, and maybe even use two different OCR tools and compare the differences.

I'd have to say that even a simple genre novel still needs careful work with the formatting. My favorite example of that is Norman Spinrad's The Mind Game. As near as I can tell, he took a darknet version of his novel, turned it into a Kindle book, and is now selling it on Amazon. I got it for free at one point. I was really disappointed with it, because unlike some other SF authors doing publishing from their darknet editions (Walter Jon Williams, for example), Spinrad apparently skipped the proofreading step. It was missing italics and short paragraphs that were made up of several one line quotations and maybe a he said at the beginning or end of a line were formatted into separate paragraphs for each line, which made it impossible to follow conversations. I posted a comment recommending not to buy the Kindle edition because of the crappy formatting, but as far I can tell, Spinrad's never fixed it.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Anyone know why Dennis McKiernan's early Mithgar books are unavailable? He seems to have a following. I'm surprised they aren't already available.

Those sort of books aren't really my bag, but when I heard the Iron Tower was essentially a rewrite of Lord of the Rings, it piqued my curiosity.

An on topic post? What is wrong with you?

I do not know, I've been keeping an eye out for his early stuff. As far as I can tell, none of his pre 1990 books are available. I have Voyage of the Fox Rider and Eye of the Hunter. The Iron Tower is available on audible. I've them in paper. I don't really think it's that much of a LOTR rewrite, though like most of the 1980's high fantasy novels, he borrows quite a bit from it. I understand that it started life as a sequel to LOTR.

Generally, if there is a book that I want as an ebook, I go to amazon and click on the I want this as an ebook link. I don't know how much good it does. McKiernan is in his 80's now, so it might simply be a case of him being more focused on other things. Reading his website, I get the impression that like a lot of authors, he's willing if a publisher is willing to do the work and pay for it (and for the right price, of course). It's kind of surprising how many authors have that particular attitude.

[bgalbrecht]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Reading his website, I get the impression that like a lot of authors, he's willing if a publisher is willing to do the work and pay for it (and for the right price, of course). It's kind of surprising how many authors have that particular attitude.

I have no idea how much they pay, but it seems like Open Road Media and Start Publishing seem to be interested in publishing SF and Fantasy genre backlist, at least in ebook format. I'm not sure if either one is doing any print on demand. Maybe he just needs an email pointing him in their directions.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by bgalbrecht

I have no idea how much they pay, but it seems like Open Road Media and Start Publishing seem to be interested in publishing SF and Fantasy genre backlist, at least in ebook format. I'm not sure if either one is doing any print on demand. Maybe he just needs an email pointing him in their directions.

Could be. They are the ones who put out the backlist Deryni books by Katherine Kurtz. If anyone is interested in it, it might be worthwhile to send an email to Open Road. It would be interesting to find out how they got the Deryni ebooks, i.e. did they approach Ms. Kurtz, did Ms. Kurtz approach them, or did some third party suggest it.

To a certain extent, I think that for backlist books, the issue is getting noticed. There is very little, if any, advertisement. With the overwhelming flood of self publishing books, you really have to be looking for them to see them. In a large part, that's why I started this thread and the backlist thread on the recommendations forum.

I keep expecting web services/news letters that will review ebooks in various genres and give a list of the best of the month and for that matter, a list of what came out (with the obvious spam ebooks (i.e. porn, PD, et al) removed. I think that back in the 80's there was a monthly SF&F news letter that did that. It seems like an ideal niche, given that IMPO the number one issue with ebooks is discover ability. I know that goodreads in kind of in the area, but I'm thinking more focused. The obvious issue is that it's a lot of work and how can make money at it.

[pwalker8]

Getting back on topic, I was going through my paperback collection and ran across several books from the 80's and early 90's that I would like. Of course, for the most part, these are books that were popular enough to have sequels but not popular enough for the author to continue writing. In most cases the author is dead, so the odds of them ever making ebook are pretty slim.

Daniel Hood's Fanuilh series. Seems to be the only thing he ever wrote, at least I can't find anything else by him. No idea what happened to him. It was a very amusing series though.

Arthur Landis's Camelot series. He died a long time ago. Basic mid-list stuff, it has similarities to Stasheff's Gramarye series. Not totally sure why I liked the series so much, but I did.

Andriene Martine-Barnes' Sword series. Got them all long ago. Once again, mid-list stuff, but I remember enjoying them, at least enough to buy the set.

To a great extent, it's books like these which I thought would be saved by ebooks. Mid-list authors who never really had a big fan base, but enough fans to at least make it worthwhile.

It's also books like these that point out the issue with orphaned, or abandoned, books. If I were emperor for a day, the one thing that I would do is change the copyright law such that for a book to be protected after 28 years, if must be available for purchase from the copyright holder at a fair market price. [for those who wish to quibble about fair market price, it's a standard legally recognized term].

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

To a great extent, it's books like these which I thought would be saved by ebooks. Mid-list authors who never really had a big fan base, but enough fans to at least make it worthwhile.

Lots of those types of books have been saved by e-books. It's just there are so many more to go. It helps if the author is alive and kicking. But even dead authors like Michael McDowell have had e-books released.

Originally Posted by pwalker8

It's also books like these that point out the issue with orphaned, or abandoned, books. If I were emperor for a day, the one thing that I would do is change the copyright law such that for a book to be protected after 28 years, if must be available for purchase from the copyright holder at a fair market price. [for those who wish to quibble about fair market price, it's a standard legally recognized term].

Yeah, I do agree with that, though there's a million arguments against it. I guess that's the good thing about being emperor.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Lots of those types of books have been saved by e-books. It's just there are so many more to go. It helps if the author is alive and kicking. But even dead authors like Michael McDowell have had e-books released.



Yeah, I do agree with that, though there's a million arguments against it. I guess that's the good thing about being emperor.

At one time, the major practical reason was that publishers controlled if the book was in print or not, and thus could hold a book out of print, let it go into PD and then print it taking all the profits. Now, of course, authors can easily self publish, so just stick language in the contract saying if it goes out of print, then the author can revert the rights to himself, and be done with it.

The other is the philosophical difference which holds that copyrights is intellectual properties, and by god, intellectual property means that the author and his or her heirs have the copyright for eternity. As Tom Petty and Mel Brooks said, it's good to be king.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Now, of course, authors can easily self publish, so just stick language in the contract saying if it goes out of print, then the author can revert the rights to himself, and be done with it.

A lot of contracts have language like that and some publishers play games by printing a few POD copies every so often to keep the book "in print".