Forgotten Books

On Fri, Oct 1, 2010 at 5:44 PM,  <john@johnspiers.com> wrote:

I wish to buy a book on amazon.com, but the product description is in goobledegook, and I am afraid it will be true of the book too...  see for yourself, and please let me know...  are your books readable?

http://www.amazon.com/History-Protestant-Reformation-England-Ireland/dp/145101712X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1285951219&sr=8-1

John,

A fair question!

Yes, all our books are readable. The reason the description shown on
Amazon is less than legible is that, due to the large numbers of texts
we publish, OCR (optical character recognition) software is used to
capture a portion of the opening chapter, and this is used as the
description. Unfortunately current OCR software leaves more than a
little to be desired, so on a small percentage of the books we publish
(in which perhaps an uncommon font or text style is used) the end
product is something like what you see here.

If you would like to check on the content of any of our books, please
feel free to browse via our website www.forgottenbooks.org - where a
free e-book is available for each title. Please do note however that
the free e-book quality is far lower than that which would be printed
in a hard copy.

Best regards,
Oliver


On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 11:13 PM, John Spiers <john@johnspiers.com> wrote:

Oliver,

Thanks for your kind note.  I figured as much, but good to have

confirmation.

It seems your biz model is to get "forgotten books" set up for POD, promote

over amazon (and googlebooks?) and then sell which copies someone orders?

 Is this right.

I am a small publisher getting teachers published, but it would be good to

know if there is someone doing what I outlined above, somewhere they could

take an important book that they have no authored themselves, and have it

made available?  Does that fit with your model?  if so, I'd like to blog

that point on my list.

John

John,

You are pretty close on the mark there, yes.

Unfortunately at this time (and for the foreseeable future) we are not
set up to publish any previously unpublished books. We have a large
list of titles that will be made available over the coming years
(somewhere in the region of 50,000) and until all these books are
completed they will be our sole occupation.
I thank you for the interest and do wish you the best of luck with
your publishing business.

Regards,
Oliver