what's the general consensus /lit/ is it lazy and a low tier effort to make a quick buck?or is it good to preserve old knowledge and stories and re-release so modern folk can have a higher chance of reading them. more people look for books on Amazon than Archive for exampleI know to sell on Amazon the book has to be different with editing, footnotes, new illustrations so it's not completely lazy.so lazy, good, or both?>oh and any success stories if anons have re published books would be appreciatedpic not related
>>23551068Does Amazon really have standards that high? I don't imagine they give a shit so long as you don't infringe on any copyright, which is easy with public domain works. So long as you aren't uploading someone else's copy exactly it shouldn't be a problem. But things like editing, footnotes, etc. are where you'd set yourself apart, and what you'd care about if you want to avoid being lazy.Don't forget that there are other things that can make a copy of a book good, like good typesetting (even if simple) and cost. Maybe a publisher is still printing copies of some PD work but they're inflating the price; make a good and cheap version to undercut them. Maybe there are tons of copies of some work on the market but they all have dismal typesetting (see >>23549936); make a nicely typeset version and advertise that.I'd question how likely someone is to stumble across some lost-to-the-masses public domain work on Amazon. Is a random person really going to find and buy these obscure works on a whim? Or do you plan on advertising? Keep in mind Amazon does print-on-demand, so there's no physical stockpile of these books just because you've put them up on the site.
>>23551068Lucas Gage did it.
>>23551446Amazon might not care, but some of the research I have done says they do. So who knows I guess.as for marketing yeah I have plans for that, not just going to release something and not do anything about it.Even if the masses don't find it accidently being on Amazon should help with search results? the stuff I want to do is stuff I've searched for and would of bought if it was available and by view count of some of the works on archive there are people reading the works. I found those by searching right in archive, couldn't find it easily through Google.maybe I'll ask in the thread you linked but what makes good typesetting? big enough to read but not to spaced apart basically? don't double space everything but don't have everything squished together? thanks
>>23551478oh nice
>>23553043Good typography makes the text easy to read and doesn't distract from the writing itself. The text should be consistent and clearly legible. Yeah, choosing the right line spacing and font size matters. Also think about how many characters fit across a single page, since it's uncomfortable to read very long horizontal lines; this with your font size determines the size of your pages and margins (do you want people to have space in the margins to write notes? I've seen posts about how Wordsworth editions despite their shitty covers are designed with ample margins for this reason, making them good cheap books to mark up). Once you figure out what makes a single page look good, you apply that to everything and fix any little problems or edge cases. Font choice is also important, but you can just stick to tried-and-true common ones. practicaltypography.com is a good source for basics like this, and you can use books you think are nice as examples to follow.To do the formatting, you can use software like LaTeX (which is free and used extensively in science and also for books). It's more or less like very simple coding for typesetting; you give it your parameters for your pages, like font, margins, how to handle headers/footers, and it'll spit out all your pages in that style, with other commands for specifics like italics or adjustments. It can also make you tables of contents and such. Think that if you wanted to make a document, it would look a little like\include{pagestyle}\begin{book}\tableofcontents\title{Name of the Book}\chapter{First Chapter}All your text, with \textit{italics} and stuff.\chapter{Second Chapter}And so on.\end{book}but would come out as nicely laid out pages of text. You could include things like chapter headers and stuff automatically.Another thing to consider beyond the formatting is the editing of the document. If it only exists as a scanned PDF, to get the text out of it you'll need to use OCR (Optical Character Recognition). There's free software that can do this for you, and often scanned documents will already have this done to them (if you can select the text in a PDF then it's already embedded in it). You'll need to extract the text and then clean it up. OCR can introduce systematic errors, like mistaking 'rn' for 'm', and it might screw up on things like page breaks. So unless you already have a nicely edited full-text version of the book, you'll need to do editing to fix errors like these (though luckily systematic errors are easier to find).
>>23551068if someone did good typeset versions that aren't just printed out pdfs, and had a site that organized them well so I wasn't buying shit I'd be more open to buying them. i just don't buy them now after getting burned so many times.
>>23553656thanks fren appreciate it
>>23553656holy fuck that's a lot of work. That book better sell dammit.
Its good
Yeah it's fine so long as however purchased your edition wouldn't regret having purchased it if they knew of the existence of a free e-book on Project Gutenberg or Standard EbooksThat's how you know you've added real value to the textOtherwise it's quite pathetic
>>23555951so give it a better cover?
>>23555965Do you think that an Amazon customer would be happy to know that they paid money for something they could have gotten for free because you added a 'better cover'?Ask your friends and family
>>23555992yes
>>23555951The OP mentioned finding these books via the (Internet) Archive. Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks aren't exhaustive projects, nor do they provide print copies; there are a lot of scanned books that haven't been fully digitized (though OP is in a for a lot of work if those are the books he's dealing with). Even if it's a bit silly, lots of people care about reading in print, and that might have even more importance if these books are used for reference material rather than pleasure-reading.
>>23555936As someone who has transcribed a public domain book, it is a lot of work but it's mostly work it, even if it doesn't sell, to have a nicer copy of the book than you could otherwise get.
>>23551068There are a whole bunch of semi-obscure books that an anon typeset into epub files a few years ago in this folderhttps://mega.nz/folder/e8NRyRZJ#YI9AnuHT6LAPvN-RG5mQ7A/folder/e0skVBIII don't know which or any are public domain or out of press, but if you want to start somewhere without having to do all of the reformatting yourself, this might be a place to start. iirc he was doing them based on suggestions from others here, so people do want to read these.
>>23557866I think most if not all of those, certainly the English translations, are in copyright. But nice ntl
