Need tips for selling epub to libraries

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by SigilBear

Amazon's ratings and reviews are really encouraging. I've checked out some incredibly lame books that have multiple reviews, suggesting that they've sold a fair number of copies. I prefer to avoid topics that have really stiff competition, but this particular topics looks like a free ride.

Want to know a secret about those Amazon reviews?

Many of those reviews come from free days. The scamlets typically have many badly written 5 star reviews.
I once found a book with nothing but 5 star reviews. It was an "American" cookbook. Nearly every recipe was Asian.
Oh and there is no free ride.
It may be there aren't many books because the topic is easier and handier to google.
I own 1,973 cookbooks and several recipe collections + around 1000 ebook cookbooks.. If I am in a hurry I tend to google. Allrecipes is my go to site.

[issybird]

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[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by SigilBear

Someone told me that the Gutenberg project is already doing just that. I was tempted to do a little work as a volunteer just to learn a little more about proof-reading, but I haven't had time yet.

Distributed Proofreaders is one of the projects where a swarm of people work on digitizing public domain works (and then upload the completed project to Project Gutenberg):

https://www.pgdp.net/c/

they also have a fantastic forum with all the tips/info you will ever need:

https://www.pgdp.net/phpBB3/

Originally Posted by GrannyGrump

I posted some links in Post # 7 of this long thread that discusses proof-reading:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=275900

I second this thread!

Originally Posted by SigilBear

I was asking for advice on hiring people to proofread public domain books that I've scanned, hopefully for a reasonable rate. A 500-page book can take literally weeks.

Depends on the length/density + complexity (Footnotes, Tables, Figures/Images, Charts, Captions, Floating Elements, Equations, [...]) add to the amount of work needed...

Then each individual book has its own potential quirks (written notes/highlighting/underlining mangling the page, maybe the font just doesn't play nice with OCR, lots of accented characters, complex formatting, etc. etc.).

And it depends on the quality of the input/scan too... a crappy scan will make your life a lot worse (if you take a look at the Archive.org scans of the State Flags book, they are not the greatest):



There are people who do these kind of conversions who are masters though ... or you could spend many many more hours doing it on your own.

Side Note: I took a quick look through those Archive.org scans and it seems like this State Flags book just has a ton of Footnotes (~900). The images all just seem to be consolidated on a handful of pages. Besides that, doesn't look like anything particularly difficult (~181k words).

Side Note #2: Not too sure if you caught this typo (or if it is in your edition of the book):

Page 53: par. 2: petitioned

When, in 1854, the residents of that section of the country now known as Arizona petioned Congress to make this district a territory, they suggested the following names by which it might be called: Pimeria, Gadsoma, and Arizona.

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Want to know a secret about those Amazon reviews?

Many of those reviews come from free days. The scamlets typically have many badly written 5 star reviews.
I once found a book with nothing but 5 star reviews. It was an "American" cookbook. Nearly every recipe was Asian.

Yeah, that is another sign of scammers, go read the reviews and see if they look absolutely fake + generic. Many of these scammers pay for reviews and they are written in horrible English, very short, or blatantly obvious it has nothing to do with the book:

"Wow, great book!"
"I love the twist at the end."
"This book are very good read!"

or the best are "legitimate" reviews where you can tell the person didn't read one sentence out of the book (they complain about things that never were even mentioned).

[SigilBear]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Depends on the length/density + complexity (Footnotes, Tables, Figures/Images, Charts, Captions, Floating Elements, Equations, [...]) add to the amount of work needed...

The obvious stumbling block is expense. I don't think I could afford to hire a person to do a quality proof-reading job, unless I hired someone from another country (e.g. India). But if a person was able to revise and sell a few public domain books and get some cash inflow, then it would definitely save an enormous amount of time to hire someone to do the first proof-reading and fix as many mistakes and omissions as possible.

Side Note: I took a quick look through those Archive.org scans and it seems like this State Flags book just has a ton of Footnotes (~900). The images all just seem to be consolidated on a handful of pages. Besides that, doesn't look like anything particularly difficult (~181k words).

Exactly, there are many public domain books of fair quality that could be dramatically improved with a minimum of effort.

Side Note #2: Not too sure if you caught this typo (or if it is in your edition of the book):

Page 53: par. 2: petitioned

When, in 1854, the residents of that section of the country now known as Arizona petioned Congress to make this district a territory, they suggested the following names by which it might be called: Pimeria, Gadsoma, and Arizona.

Wow, you have sharp eyes. I caught that mistake, and a few others. The author has a few odd (or perhaps outdated) conventions that I didn't change, just to preserve the character of the original.

Yeah, that is another sign of scammers, go read the reviews and see if they look absolutely fake + generic. Many of these scammers pay for reviews and they are written in horrible English, very short, or blatantly obvious it has nothing to do with the book:

"Wow, great book!"
"I love the twist at the end."
"This book are very good read!"

Those sound like the posts on my WordPress blogs.

Actually, some of the book reviews I read were fairly lengthy and informative. I even took notes from some of them.

[Cinisajoy]

I just wanted to let you know that the cookbook I have referred to, I did get a quote on how much it would cost to turn into a decent ebook. The quote was $300. I found the quote very reasonable. More than I wanted to invest so won't be doing that one as an ebook.

[SigilBear]

Yes, that doesn't sound like a bad price. If I had a string of successes, giving me a steady cash flow, I'd gladly pay that.