It appears to be hard to tell. I just went to the advance search form and did a search for publisher quality books and sorted them by copyright date. It is interesting to find out that they number over 80,000. The last page had results that appeared to have errors in the copyright dates. They were copyrighted something like 0010. Now, I really doubt that they were really copyrighted in the year ten. I then tried the previous page and still got copyright dates that did not seem real, so I started going back one page at a time until I came upon something that looked like a real date. When I did it was copyrighted in1858. Now that sounds like a real copyright date, but it was obviously not the original edition. I am pretty sure that electronic text did not exist in 1858. I decided that at this rate I could spend all day going back one page at a time, so I abandoned the search. I am not sure that it would have been very meaningful anyway. Different publishers went digital at different times. I would expect that large publishers probably went digital before smaller publishers did, but that would be only a general thing and it could not be said that any particular publisher did it before any other particular publisher without some information on the history of the publishers in question anyway. My guess is that a book published before 1990 would most likely not have been published originally in a digital format. Maybe I shouldn't use the word published in that context because they were not really published that way. It was just a matter of having an electronic file to send to a computerized printing press. That does not mean, though, that any book published before 1990 is going to not appear in a publisher quality form on Bookshare. If that was the case then we would not have that one copyrighted 1858. If it went out of print before that date, though, and it has not come back into print it probably will not show up as a publisher quality addition. Note that I said probably. The simple fact is that with every book you scan you are taking a gamble that it will be replaced. Even if a publisher has not signed the Bookshare agreement that does not mean that they will not do so in the future. All you can do is work with probabilities. Older out of print books are less likely to be replaced. Books published by small obscure presses are less likely to be replaced. Personally, I have stopped worrying about it. As far as I know none of my submissions have been replaced yet. That is not necessarily because I have been consciously playing those odds. I think it has more to do with the fact that I am prone to be able to acquire and am more interested in books that have a low probability of being replaced in the first place. However, if my submissions do begin to be replaced I am not going to worry about it overly much. Again, I mention the volunteer in the homeless shelter analogy. If I was working as a volunteer in a homeless shelter and the people I had helped got homes I would not consider my work to have been wasted because I would still have helped them when they needed it. If the books I have submitted to Bookshare are replaced then at least they were available to Bookshare users up until the time that they were no longer needed. That is not to mention that I enjoyed working on the books and whether they are replaced or not that enjoyment of the past cannot be taken away from me. So I have stopped worrying about safe and unsafe publishers. I just check the collection and the books being scanned lists and if I don't find what I am contemplating scanning I go ahead and scan it. I am going to have to remind myself to check the books in process list though. I tend to forget about that. And speaking of books in process, I will admit being a bit miffed once over what I was going to scan. I had checked all the lists and did not find what I was considering scanning, so I ordered it from an on line bookseller. When it arrived I took one more look at the collection only to find that that very day it had been added after having been processed by an outsourcer. I mentioned that on list and Carrie soon announced that she was going to post a list of books that included both the books being scanned by us volunteers and the books that were being worked on by outsourcers. That list became known as the master list. What ever happened to that. It seems to have been forgotten. Without it it is like having the most productive volunteer's scans not appearing on the books being scanned list. That includes a lot and we just might be working on something that will be added to the collection the very day that after we have finished a lot of work and are about to upload our work.
On 7/16/2012 3:22 PM, Debby Franson wrote:
Hi Evan and everyone!Does anyone know what the earliest year is at this time for publisher-donated ebooks? That information would help me decide what is an "older book". Thanks.Debby At 12:29 PM 7/11/2012, Evan Reese wrote in partAnd even for publishers that Bookshare does get books from, it is worthwhile to look into their older books. Lissi and I will be shortly adding a book from Simon & Schuster that was published back in 1995. It's very unlikely that that will be sent in by the publisher.--mailto:<the.bee@xxxxxxxxxxxx> --The tongue of the wise uses knowledge rightly, But the mouth of fools pours forth foolishness.Proverbs 15:2 NKJV "Teach me, and I will hold my tongue ; Cause me to understand wherein I have erred. Job 6:24 NKJV To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxxput the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list of available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line.
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