Munsey’s Technosnarl

From a message posted by Chad at Coachwhip Publications, seems there’s a title, A Song for Satawal, by Kenneth Brower, that’s available to any and all from Google Book Search, ‘cuz of an 1817 copyright date.

Book overview

Full view - 1817 - 218 pages

Unfortunately, 1817 marks the start of Harper and Row; book itself was first published 1983, and copyrighted in all nations apart from North Korea and Bhutan.  Letting the whole .pdf of this book be downloaded is, err, probably a no-no.

I’m going to register anger now.  When searching GBS, you’ll find some of the later (#6-10) Fantomas translations by Allain and Souvestre in the system, but despite being PD, you can’t download them, for no apparent reason.  But, despite the popularity, you wouldn’t want to drop $3-400 on the originals, and then be able to download them six months later.  Explain that sort of write-off to the IRS particularly if the scan date shows as ‘06.  Grumble…

No later Juve, but, this poor guy’s title is available.  Way to go, Google.

When not drinking or sleeping off effects of same at the Chelsea, I attended GBS things at BEA, talking about orphan works and so forth, plus what might be covered in the settlement.  I don’t recall anyone, even the staunchest GBS advocate from the Guild, signing off for full-view, free downloads of content, inadvertent or otherwise.  Google was held to be infallible.

Speculating here, but at least part of what might make Google’s errors actionable without the settlement is their failure to properly explain how books are chosen and scanned (they’re calling it a trade secret, implying a process that employs dedicated, full-time, vested employees who eagerly face mundane task of scanning thousands of books, as opposed to say, college students who handle light industrial work via the wake ‘n bake, 4:20 break,  and maybe some lighter tokes in-between.)  Spiel works well until the reader spots a peculiar hand-signal in certain editions…

Note, as someone who proofs full-views texts on a regular basis: Google’s scans have gotten more consistent, particularly since Spring ‘08 at Harvard, but… that book was uploaded June ‘08 from Cal, and this hopefully isolated incident is in no way a confidence-inspiring miss.

So, I pulled the Google ads a couple days ago.  Forget the new privacy policy, it’s just I, err, was blocking them…

I expected page views to go down again once we finally get back to sorting by new, popular, etc. (any day now), but there’s another reason for dropping ads.

Strangely, Munsey’s, a site that unlike Black Mask gets most of its downloads via mobile interfaces (Stanza, et al and our version), has, in this economy, actually been profitable for over a year now.  Since the time we first experimented w/ CreateSpace. This, despite the amazing falloff in sales experienced by the folks who’ve been reprinting Project Gutenberg all these years.

It’s kind of a long story, I haven’t been reprinting Project Gutenberg, haven’t done much w/ pulps, haven’t even gotten all of Olympia into other networks, but I’ve managed to find some hits for Kendrick Bangs’ first editing gig.  And I’m still holding a couple hundred free setups w/ CreateSpace that I haven’t used… yet.

There’s a budget for new things (namely an improved mobile site); it’s just a matter of getting time with our busy programmer, and fixing other issues, while of course working on the site that contributes just a bit more to our bottom line.

I know Disruptive Publishing’s Optical Media licensee has  something new she’s working on, so, in the future, we’ll be advertising her, but maybe just over the search bar.  There’s also another ebook format coming, but, July 4th is PG’s week.

Cheers.

Just ‘cuz I know a little something about the secondary market for titles that have not made it through the court system unscathed.  Ahem.

At the moment, only seller on Bookfinder who definitely has 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye is Mungobooks. They want about $180 for it.  The work is sold out at Amazon UK.  But don’t panic.  The book, itself, can be had easily for maybe $20, and supply of it should increase in the EU (where it has not been banned from publication.)

Just remember, there are actually two versions of the book.  A U.S. advance review copy, which is worth hundreds and could definitely increase in value (so yeah, go ahead and give Cal Reid and his lady a nice weekend on the town if he sells it on Ebay), and a European edition, which is worth whatever new trade paperbacks are worth.  $10-15 or so.

You might have luck w/ this seller.  But double-check.  And don’t race into it.

Disclaimer: I have bought from Mungobooks in the past, and they are quite reputable, but… somewhat opportunistic.

/Semi-related, just signed to translate an original work from Swedish on Olympia. But that’s more… bondagy…

Heise.de and Golem.de are both reporting that Amazon couldn’t come to a deal with mobile operators.  We’ll see about the UK, though.

The vanishing sales ranks, part of #amazonfail of a few months ago, were, ahem, unpopular.  However, erotica books in the Kindle store did not have sales ranks, from store launch… until today.

I don’t know why Amazon elected to add those ranks in, or if maybe that was the plan, but the Kindle store’s software wasn’t up to it.  Or maybe Amazon wants to show how nice it’s been to the indies.

Anyway, now everybody has a sales rank.  Figuring out how many books Amazon sells each week just got a little easier.  And, off the record, if Samhain is really only getting 35% of the cover price for each Kindle book sold, Christina, honey, renegotiate!

Guess this site has sucked the last few nights.

Ick.

In better news, I’ve gone ahead and upgrade the PC I use for scanning purposes, to Vista (blech) and 64, Dual-whatever.  Scanning of titles is now going a lot faster, so maybe there’s original pulps in your future.

/No idea how the site work’s going…

Err, OK.  I’ll think about it.  But that’s a lot of responsibility, being someone’s Scribd friend.  Will I have to know about their birthday?  Be on their registry should my new Scribd friend get married/reproduce/die?  This is a lot for me to take on just now.  I’ve just gotten FiOS working again.

Maybe we should just be faceless online acquaintances…

The newest thing with Scribd’s book program is they’re sending me daily updates about my (selling-quite-strongly-in-other-venues) smutty books.  One of them is added to favorites with some regularity.

I’ve stuck at three copies sold (total) since the selling started.  Elsewhere, Kindle store sales were up another 10% for April, following the big jump from Feb.-March (first full month of Kindle 2.)

So, that’s good.  No ETA for FiOS return (:

Sorry,  gang, Fios went out with the DC Metro Crash yesterday.  Still got books up.  Not sure why HTML is missing, but I’m uploading this from outside the Rockville Library.  Haven’t missed a daily update on Munsey’s since Oct. 31, 2007 (when I picked the wrong hotel in Little Rock, AR, having driven from DC, and being incapable of driving further.)

Anyway, they’ll hopefully fix it tomorrow, or at least not keep me waiting, so I can get things uploaded from inside the library.

Note that there is a bar near here with Wifi, but, you know, I’ll take advantage of the downtime and go to work on something for Silk.

you’re redirected to the page you came from. Work’s being done, slowly.

Umm, shh, between you and me, the stuff at OpenLibrary, especially the descriptions they snagged from Amazon or another ISBN source, isn’t ready yet to be reused… in fact, it seems that data was sorta just tossed out there.

Don’t tell nobody ’bout that, though.  It’s our little secret, and what we spent last week discovering…

shh.