I know the feeling well. Just last February, when a new book of essays by William H. Gass was published, I was not expecting Bookshare to have it, because they don't have much by Gass and I didn't know Knopf was working with Bookshare, but I checked anyway on the evening of its publication, already feeling my disappointment setting in, knowing it wasn't going to be there, but knowing also that I had to check for my own satisfaction, because as small as the chance was that it would be on the site, that chance still existed, cycled through headings and expected to find nothing, and found the collection in publisher quality. I made a few noises that, if they had been heard by anyone, would have made people question if I was truly human, and the three days until my downloads came back seemed like years. If nothing changes and Knopf doesn't decide to withdraw from the agreement with Bookshare, I'm expecting a similar excitement next March, when his first novel since the mammoth and brilliant The Tunnel in eighteen years, Middle C, and probably his last since he's eighty-eight years old, is to be published.
On 29-Sep-12 20:56, Evan Reese wrote:
Thanks Ali, I was not aware that this had happened before. I was absolutely gonna buy this book and scan it if Basic Books was not a publisher Bookshare was working with. I didn't know whether it was, but I was of course first going to check Bookshare's publishers list to see if it was on it. But before doing that I just decided to enter the title and see if it came up as one of those previews and got this majorly pleasant surprise instead.Evan ----- Original Message ----- *From:* Ali Al-hajamy <mailto:aalhajamy@xxxxxxxxx> *To:* bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> *Sent:* Saturday, September 29, 2012 8:43 PM *Subject:* [bksvol-discuss] Re: Massive Kudos to Bookshare and Basic Books This isn't the first time such an event has occurred. Kurt Vonnegut's latest publication, We Are What We Pretend To Be, an omnibus of his first and last works, is set to be released on 9 october, yet I saw it come in on Thursday, I think. The first time I remember something like this was when Haruki Murakami's latest novel, 1Q84, was published in late 2011, and Bookshare got it one day before its official release. Getting books on the day they're published is good enough, but having them on Bookshare before the general public by several days is even more pleasant a surprise. On 29-Sep-12 20:35, Evan Reese wrote:I just found a book on Bookshare that was added before it's officially published. The book, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves, by George Church and Ed Regis. https://www.bookshare.org/browse/book/550087 According to Amazon, the book will not be released until Tuesday. That includes the Kindle version. I heard about it from one of the mailing lists I'm on. Just on a whim, I decided to enter the title into the Advanced search field, thinking that I could at least get one of those preview things I got once before, which would mean that the full book would be coming, hopefully on the day of it's official release. However, I was very pleasantly surprised to find that I was wrong. After downloading it and checking the size, and going to the bottom of the file on my Pac Mate, I discovered that this is indeed the full version of the book. It was added on September 14. On top of that, it is paginated, correctly. I know that because there's an index at the end and the page numbers there match a couple things I've checked. This is just so utterly cool I had to write and give massive kudos to Bookshare and the publisher Basic Books for letting me get ahold of this great book before it's released to the general public. Evan
