Rider at the Gate, Cloud’s Rider. Rimrunners. Tripoint. Finity’s End, Goblin Mirror, Rusalka, Chernevog, Yvgenie. They won’t be the only ones. Don’t expect them all to appear at once, and that’s not the order in which they will appear. Remember it takes us some deal of time to get them into format, working late in the evenings AFTER doing our regular writing during the day, plus trying to get our electronic records into order AND trying to do editing, covers, and webmastering the blogs and websites. But don’t rush out and pay huge amounts for a personal copyof these titles unless you’re a fanatic collector.
Coming, as e-books.
by CJ | Nov 24, 2009 | Journal | 74 comments
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I downloaded your Mobipocket reader a while back and have
been utilizing Baen’s Free Library. Works like a gem!I do
love my books,but I’m hard on them as I read them over &
over. I hate logging,when I was 7 I watched loads of the
giant Redwoods go out of Covelo valley. Many of the trucks
could only haul one behemoth at a time. I’ve never been
able to forget or forgive the rape of forest that soared
like the flying buttresses of Gothic cathedrals. Lost.
The book business as a business, which, as I’ve commented elsewhere, I’ve merely brushed against, always struck me as poorly managed at best. Once conglomerates got ahold of it, things have deteriorated further, ignorant bean counters controlling decisions for which managers have to create scenarios promising impossible quarterly growth figures, when 2 years to bring out a book is common.
And then there are real sleazeball, sweatshop like, organizations like Hachette. The French founders–lets just say I was hearing stories about them dating back to 1972 and a (brief) joint arrangement they had with Playboy to put out a sister publication, Ou.i (In the inaugural issue of which appeared my first published words, a book review of Cynthia Buchanon’s novel, Maiden.)
The lack of backlist problem appears to have been growing for decades, and I’ve never understood why the Feds wouldn’t revert the tax code to the old days vis a vis the inventory tax issue. But I’ve gone looking for books of yours, such as the last Morgaine book, and never saw it in a bookstore (NYC). If the first three volumes were republished as an omnibus volume, you think one could find the fourth volume. No backlist, few impulse sales, increase reliance on blockbuster leaders, to bring in buyers to buy … what else.
Another example was a German book about The Illiad, Homer and the new archaeological evidence unearthed (?) in the recent (last 20 years) of digs in the Troiad (Troy and the surrounding area) The author, J Latacz, a distinguished Swiss scholar heading a project producing a multi-volume varioram edition of Homer, wrote a popular book, several hundred pages long, that was an enormous success in Germany, going through 4 or 5 revisions in about ten years. I had read an earlier popular volume of more traditional literary analysis of his earlier. Oxford U. Press published an English translation of his German book (2005?), but not only was it not distributed to U.S. bookstores, bookstores could not even order it; I tried. Oxford was apparently going for the textbook market, and was selling the volume for close to $50 (maybe a tad less in paperback.) This is a book, published at about the time that a big MOVIE (if not very good) comes out on the Trojan war, at least as well written as say Walter Isaacson on Ben Franklin or Einstein, and nobody can buy it except a few libraries and a few students whose professors are sadistic enough (or spaced out enough) to make their student pay $50 ($35 or $40 paperback?) for what could only be used as a supplementery text!
This was a book that was a best seller, or close to it, in Europe!
Just two examples from a consumer, of which I am sure you have myriads more at your finger tips.
I look forward to the success of your venture, even if I am very fond of (relatively acid free) paper.
If you convert our files, certain print-on-demand companies will let you print one (fairly pricey) copy as a bound book. Cafe Press and lulu I believe will both do this.
Plus, if you are trying hard to find one of our books and can’t—let us know. There are occasional works under other people’s copyright that can’t be liberated, but even among those—sometimes, by careful arrangement. Just come here first.
I never thought I’d end up anxious for books to go out of print and rights to revert to me…but…the world is changing. I knew what I was taking on when I studied 6 hard years to bring Latin to public schools—immediately we had the free love generation and dropped the language requirement, reducing the job opportunities; I write—and now they’ve screwed up the publishing industry beyond any imagination of a sane person. But by golly, we’re still afloat, and if the industry ends up being a network of interconnected writers who’ll recommend each other as ‘meeting professional standards,’ so be it. We no longer use goose quills, either.
I’ll do Heavy Time – but I can’t start it until Monday… We’ll see how long it takes, and who else steps up to the plate (I do have the original Faery in Shadow and Hellburner (gracefully signed by the author:) in possession as well if it comes to that. We’ll see)
I’ll start on Tripoint. Notice I didn’t say do the whole novel. I think we should share the task. I will start on the first page of the first chapter and go from there. I have the 1995 paperback edition.
Perhaps we should have a thread to keep track of this in?
Wait, wait, Spence, I think I’ve recovered Tripoint! Can you do Hellburner?? Or maybe Goblin Moon? Or the original Faery in Shadow?
I can do Hellburner, but not the others; I was hoping to buy them from Closed Circle!
That’s ok. Hellburner would be a big help.
Hestia? I read it when it was first published in paperback…right after Bothers of Earth and the Morgaine trilogy (Thank you Science Fiction Book Club) It is so wonderful to know that we will soon be able to renew old friendships. One more thing that makes this site THE BEST!!
HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ONE AND ALL 😆
Awww, 😉 Thank you, smartcat! Happy Thanksgiving, indeed!
Just a question on OCRing books.
I’ve done this myself for a seven-book series. They weren’t as thick as today’s fantasy books but all in all there were about 1200 pages to scan.
The problem isn’t scanning. The problem is what happens next. If you want the original text and the scanned text to look the same (paragraphs at the same places and so on) you might have to do it yourself. I had to. I went through every page in these books and made sure I made proper breaks and all the other things needed to make the OCR’d text look exactly like the text in the book.
I used Abbey Fine Reader (a “light” version that came with my scanner that is over four years old) to scan. It put out pages in rtf (or other formats of choice) that had the same layout as the original page. I was unable to take those pages and put them together with the other pages into a whole book. It looked like a horrible puzzle gone wrong. I couldn’t make any changes to that formatting either.
If anyone knows of a good Free OCR software (It’s hard to find one’s that actually do Work well) that can save the formatting to file, could you recommend it here?
ericf
Some of my contracts (Warner) have a clause that forbids exact repro of what the company considers ‘its’ formating and editing. Which is ok, because I’m a fanatic and do not play well with copyeditors…besides I have the antique notion of including some of my own artwork and Jane’s in some volumes. So I’ll mess with any files until they’re what I want.
Now mind, friends, there are some books I can’t do, because they’re in current issue (DAW)—but!—DAW is getting aggressive about putting books in e-book format, so you should be able to get e-book editions, just not from me.
In the CC site, we will have links to Selina Rosen, who sells the Ivrel Graphic, and hardbounds and paperbacks of mine in all sorts of languages (including English). The English-language ones are all signed copies; we will also have links to our Amazon stores, and to our Cafe Press stores. We will have links to other writers doing the same sort of thing we are, people like Barbara Hambly, etc, and they will link back to us.
The only sticky bit of navigation is that once you push that Paypal or Amazon button, you’re going to be There and not quite on Our Site, so we have to rely on the computer smarts of our readers to push that old Back <--- button or their Bookmark of our site and get back to us. Install us in your favorites and you will never have a navigation glitch!
I hate it when I intend to answer a question and lose track of the comment that asked it.
To the question—is print on demand a possibility. Answer: yes. No matter that you aren’t the author, if you have a pdf, as I understand it, a print on demand service will do ONE copy of any book. Not inexpensive—but it will give you that copy.
What we are currently considering for the download process is a zip file containing several versions/formats, one of which would be pdf, one mobi, one ePub. That should let you do just about anything.
CLARION CALL TO ACTION!
CJ would never ask anyone to do this, but I will. Scanning and running text through an OCR is a rather laborious task. And it needs to be done before a book can be sold on her Closed Circle site.
So, I am asking for volunteers to join the Scanner Corps.
If you have the following 3 things you can help.
1. a scanner
2. a copy of Hellburner
3. the desire to help CJ
My copy of has 310 pages. That’s a lot of scans and trips through an OCR! So, if we get several people doing a chapter at a time, it’s only 10-15 scans.
Here’s what I’ve come up with:
Step one, go to freeocr (dot) com and down load an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program.
Step two, post your claim to the next chapter. I have chapter one. The next volunteer will take 2, 3, 4, etc. That way we’ll be organized and not repeat each other’s work.
Step three, scan the first page of your chapter, using the preview function to familiarize yourself with the process. You need to get all of that page, even the part that bends toward the binding, and none of the other page.
Step four, save that graphic with a formula that you will recognize. I used HB1, HB2, HB3, etc (for Hellburner page 1, 2, 3 . . .)
Step five, run that first graphic through the OCR program to familiarize yourself with how it will work. It will put all of the characters that it recognizes in a manipulable form.
Repeat steps 3-5 until you are assured that your graphics will work well in the OCR.
Step six, scan and save all the rest of the pages in your chapter.
Step seven, run each graphic through the OCR and clean up the text. An OCR is inherently dumb. It wants to recognize any text it can see, including that on the back side of the page, too. And sometimes it will tell you there is an * when really it’s an a. So, clean up each page to what your edition of Hellburner says. This will help CJ a great deal.
Step eight, paste the final product into a Word Perfect or MSWord word processor document with the other pages of your chapter. Do not change the formatting. Do not include the page number or the information at the top of each page.
Step nine, send an email to: CJ at cherryh dot com with the following topic: Comlink Hellburner chapter (whatever)
Step ten, post what you’ve done here. Then if you like, take the next available chapter.
I’d like to help, but I’ve never done scanning and OCRing before. So I’ll try to get this to work (probably in the Christmas holiday, if I can get time off work) before I promise to do a specific chapter.
I’ve got Devil to the Belt, which is an omnibus edition of Hellburner and Heavy Time together. Would that be all right for you, or would combining different editions be trouble?
I haven’t got the Riders-books, nor the Russian books, the Faery books, the Morgaine saga, the Merovingen Nights, the Dreaming Tree, or the Fortress books, so I can’t help with those. I stopped buying them secondhand when your posts here made me realise that that means you don’t get any income from them, while if I wait till you turn them into E-books it helps you write what you want to write. I’ve got a lot of good reading to look forward to, when you bring them out gradually as E-books!
Of the older books, I did get a secondhand copy of Heroes in Hell, Sword of Knowledge (Reap the Whirlwind), Rimrunners, and also (new) the Paladin, The Deep Beyond (the Cuckoo’s Egg is an interesting sort of preview of some of the ideas in the Bren-books: I think a lot of readers would be interested in that), Wave without a Shore, Merchanter’s Luck, Downbelow Station, Tripoint, and of course the Chanur-books, and the recently-available books whose publication-rights probably haven’t reverted yet.
Are any of these useful to scan for you, or have you got files for all of them already? Even if you haven’t got the rights back yet, or they aren’t sorted out yet, it might be good to have them as digital files for your own archives.
I think Spence has a great idea. Hellburner is one I do need. And piece by piece is great. I’ll go over it and fix the problems, but if you can compare your file to the original page and fix anything obvious, like mistaking 1 and lower-case L, a common OCR glitch, or o and 0, that would be a huge help.
Apologies if someone has already mentioned this, but have you considered having a gift card option on CC? I’m finally giving in and asking for an e-reader for Christmas in anticipation of CC, and it struck me this morning that the perfect companion gift would be a CC gift card, so I actually had something to read on it. Taking it one step further would be the option to send an e-book as a gift direct from CC. Might draw in another few readers as well. Just a thought…
Happy thanksgiving to one and all.
Mmm. Let me think on that one. But it’s a great idea.
BTW, I sell Kindles in my Amazon store, just so everybody knows. Shameless plug. 😉
I have the Warner hardback. Since we are actually scanning individual chapters, the page numbers are irrelevant, at least for the moment.
So… should I take chapter 2? I could do a couple of chapters this weekend.
ericf
I have the devil to the belt edition and just finished the first chapter, eric. I’ll sign back on when my eyes can see clearly again!
Okay. I’ll be going to bed now but I’ll be back to read in about 8 hours.
Ericf
Night, ericf!
Hi, guys.
I will start with Hellburner, last chapter first, and head back towards you! This is the Warner hardback. It has always been my favorite, I think, of CJ’s books. This may be because I’m an old Navy pilot…
alright, lets say that Eric has chapters 2, 3, 4, & 5 and Crow has 19, 18, 17, & 16. I’ll do 6, 7, 8, & 9.
If anyone wishes to join us, they can take 10 – 15. But please let us know how you are doing and which ones you are currently working on.
I’m back.
So, I’ll scan chapters 2-5 and when I’ve finished I’ll post here. I’ll probably start this afternoon.
ericf