Roger,
Perhaps a copy of your message could also be sent to Robin, publisher
liason as well.
Susan
*From:*bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] *On Behalf Of *Roger
Loran Bailey
*Sent:* Wednesday, March 12, 2014 6:28 PM
*To:* bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
*Subject:* [bksvol-discuss] Re: List of Penguin Imprints (was Re: Re:
We've signed with Penguin!)
#
I didn't want to take the time to do a more thorough search right now,
but I think it might be more productive to search for imprints of
specific publishers. I did a search for imprints of Harper and Row.
That was just a publisher that popped into my mind on the spot. The
results were considerably fewer in number, but a quick skim of them
did not show a list of imprints for that publisher. I didn't put the
phrase in quotation marks and that might have helped.
Personally, though, I am inclined to do exactly what I am doing. I
search the collection for a book I am contemplating scanning and if it
isn't there I go ahead and scan it. If it gets replaced it just gets
replaced. I suppose that is easy for me to say because the ones I
contribute do not seem to be replaced so far. I think Penguin may do
so though. As I recall the furor when volunteer submissions started
disappearing, though, it rather upsets a lot of people. Even if you do
avoid certain publishers, though, the publishers you do not avoid may
join up later just like Penguin is now doing and if you avoid certain
publishers that is likely to leave a lot of books off Bookshare too.
There are a lot of out of print books out there that were published by
publishers that have signed the agreement that went out of print
before electronic copies were even kept and the publishers have never
revived them. If volunteers do not scan those they may never get on
Bookshare.
Now, since I am discussing enormous numbers of books being added to
Bookshare let me bring up something that I brought up a long time ago
and never heard anything else about it it either. Maybe Madeleine can
address this. Google books has millions of scanned books. As I
understand the copyright exception that allows Bookshare to exist it
should be perfectly legal for Google to hand over every one of them to
Bookshare. I asked an earlier volunteer liaison, Pavi, about that once
and she said that Bookshare was involved with Google in talks about
just that very thing. I have never heard anything else about it. I
wonder what the status of that is. By the way, if Google Books did
turn over its entire collection to Bookshare I imagine that all
volunteers might as well quit. That should just about cover every book
there is to scan.
Here is another suggestion I have made too. Open library has hundreds
of thousands of books they have scanned and are available in Daisy
format on their site. From what I have seen, they are all pretty good
scans, but they are still raw scans. They do contain scanning errors,
but I have yet to come across one that was in such poor condition that
Bookshare would grade it as fair. Those fair Bookshare books are
unreadable. All the Open library books need is proofreading. I know
that there is some relationship between Bookshare and Open Library. I
just don't know what that relationship is. It seems to me, though,
that Bookshare might be able to take advantage of that relationship to
offer a deal to Open Library. That is that if Open Library would put
their books that Bookshare and they do not share on the Bookshare
checkout list volunteers could then proofread them and a copy could
then go into the Bookshare collection and a copy could be returned to
Open Library. That would be to the mutual benefit of both
organizations. Madeleine said that she was intrigued by the suggestion
and mentioned it to the office staff, but it never went further. Well,
okay, I am mentioning it again just in case it might go further this time.
On 3/12/2014 8:53 PM, Judy s. wrote:
Hi Roger,
I hadn't thought of looking for imprints other than Penguin. Good
idea. I just checked on Wikipedia. One search I tried was
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=publisher+imprint
and it came back 11,228 results! Definitely a monumental task!
Judy s.
On 3/12/2014 7:45 PM, Roger Loran Bailey wrote:
#
Something else just occurred to me. Some time back Jamie from
Michigan started a list of so-called safe publishers, safe in
that they were not submitting books to Bookshare and so are
not likely to replace books that volunteers have supplied. For
a while I was looking for publishers to add to that list and
encouraged others to do so too. Then I realized something.
Over the centuries since Herr Gutenberg invention uncountable
publishers have come and gone. Sometimes a publisher will
start up and publish only a few books until it fails and in
other cases an author may self publish and make up a publisher
name for his one book and so that publisher will publish only
one book. The number of those one book publishers is also
probably unimaginably high. What it comes down to is that it
is not even remotely possible to compile a complete list of
publishers that do not contribute to Bookshare. It makes a lot
more sense to just have a list of publishers that do and to
have a list of their imprints. Quite often if you look at the
book itself it is impossible to tell if the publisher listed
is the parent publisher or just an imprint and that is not to
mention publishers which once were independent, but have been
acquired by a parent publisher. Once we have such a list we
could just assume that all publishers that are not on the list
are safe. Madeleine said that she would work on such a list,
but as far as I know it was never done. I imagine that is
because that is a monumental and daunting task too. Now, I did
not think of Wikipedia. If you got a list of Penguin imprints
from Wikipedia I wonder how Wikipedia is doing for other
publishers. That just might be the source we need for that
list of imprints. Did you notice while you were looking around
there if there are other lists of publisher imprints?
