5 ms·

I couldn't find any info on your page regarding the royalties model that you're going to use. How much of a cut are you going to take? Is it going to be close

I couldn't find any info on your page regarding the royalties model that you're going to use. How much of a cut are you going to take? Is it going to be closer to amazon's 70% or closer to bandcamp's 15%? Why do you have the restriction to original work and public domain work "with your own take"? For me, personally, that's a bit disappointing, since I work largely on digital reproductions of public domain work leaving it "as is". One of my leisure time pursuits is to find interesting old books on cavalry, making them into high-quality reflowable e-books. It's a lot of work. I sometimes have to find multiple originals in libraries and antiquarian bookstores if there isn't a single original available in a good enough condition. Then I type them in multiple times to make sure there are no typos. I scan & vectorize the graphics. Then I produce nice reflowable EPUBs and ensure compatibility with a wide range of hardware. That kind of thing is hard work, and yet that sort of work is probably not protectable by copyright. It's been a personal frustration of mine that platforms for bookselling are often so uninviting towards that kind of content. -- It would be pretty easy for me to take a work like that and make it into an edition "with commentary", but, honestly, I'd much rather allow these works to shine in their original glory.

marvindanig 8y ago
> Why do you have the restriction to original work and public domain work "with your own take"? Fixed and deployed. Yes, feel free to publish public domain works as you like it! > …regarding the royalties model that you're going to use. 15:85 for Bubblin:Creator using simple Stripe Connect. I'll be rolling out these pages in the next few hours.
- stakhanov 8y ago
  Cool! ...I like your level of responsiveness towards user suggestions :-)
Fang_ 8y ago
> One of my leisure time pursuits is to find interesting old books on cavalry Woah, that sounds cool! Do you have anything publicly available?
- stakhanov 8y ago
  I'm putting the finishing touches on my first one and should be able to release it over the next couple of weeks. It's the "Exercier-Reglement der K&K Cavallerie" from 1898, Habsburg-Austria's "answer" to the more well-known Prussian army riding instructions from 1882. I can post a link here when it's ready, in case you're interested (just bookmark this thread). -- It will be in German, though. (Maybe I'll get into the business of translating one day, but not as of now). I also have a second one in the pipeline, which is the aforementioned Prussian work (which eventually developed into the even more well-known HDV12 in its edition from 1937 that had a great deal of influence on the kind of dressage we see today). When I'm done with that, I've already collected the source material on the British "Cavalry Drill", also of 1898. That one will be in English, obviously, but have no clue on when it might be ready.
kevingrahl 8y ago
> One of my leisure time pursuits is to find interesting old books on cavalry, making them into high-quality reflowable e-books. That’s so cool! Is there any chance you’re willing to share those epub’s? I’m a private Archivist/Data Hoarder and would love to get my hands on those files just to keep them safe. Feel free to contact me, my email is on my profile.
- stakhanov 8y ago
  I'll definitely share the EPUBs. My current plan is roughly as follows: I'll create a Facebook group to serve as a "reading club" and publish the fulltext in a bit-by-bit fashion to the group as Facebook documents, maybe also to Bubblin at zero price. I like the idea of being able to link directly to individual pages within the Bubblin-based ebook. The usefulness of this feature depends a bit on how good the previews look that Facebook would end up extracting for those links. For people who want a more proper book experience there will be a ZIP file available for download with a printable PDF and an EPUB. I'll make that bundle available for purchase using a service similar to gumtree but better geared for the German market. My hope would be that, through these purchases, I can recoup some of the costs that went into the production of those works. After the reading club is through, or when I've made enough money to break even, whichever comes first, I'll upload the EPUB for free to Amazon, project gutenberg, archive.org, wikisource, wikimedia commons, and whatever other platform I can think of. I'll also upload the scanned source material to achive.org. I can send it to you as well, if you'd like, once I get to that stage. The baseline strategy here would be to just upload to Kindle Direct Publishing and put a price tag on it. But if I did that, then Amazon would stand to benefit from my efforts more than either I or the general public would, and it would probably not get the material as much circulation. So that's what I'm trying to avoid by doing things this way.
  - MetalGuru 8y ago
    You’re awesome!
  - halfjew22 8y ago
    I’ve been designing a new business model that is a positive sum game for all players. I’m sick of these rent seeking fee grabbing antiquated ideas prevailing just because “that’s how it’s always been done” I truly respect your efforts and wouldn’t comment here if I didn’t think I had a way to improve that process for you. Please email me if you’re interested in hearing more. Email is username at gmail. Looking forward to hopefully hearing from you.
zozbot123 8y ago
> One of my leisure time pursuits is to find interesting old books on cavalry, making them into high-quality reflowable e-books. ... Why not crowdfund this work, with a commitment to submitting it DRM-free to Project Gutenberg (or perhaps DP-EU, for works that PG cannot accept)? This pure 'sweat of the brow' work seems to be especially appropriate for crowdfunding, as opposed to plain old content protection.
- Anthony-G 8y ago
  I gather from their wonderful pseudonym that he/she has a different attitude to “sweat of the brow”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexey_Stakhanov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexey_Stakhanov
  - stakhanov 8y ago
    haha, yeah, that's right about stakhanov. wikisource actually does crowdsource this type of work. regarding crowdfunding: it's not actually all that capital intensive and i prefer no capital and no responsibilities. otherwise i could get in trouble balancing responsibilities toward crowdfunding investors versus responsibilities toward the employer who i actually work for to pay my bills.
    - zozbot123 8y ago
      Crowdsourcing is also done by the 'distributed proofreaders' subproject of Project Gutenberg. It is an uncomfortable fact though that many 'DP' projects run aground without actually seeing a Project Gutenberg release, due to the lack of people who are willing to push the projects through and especially to 'post-process' them, i.e. take the proof-read and marked-up pages and actually create a final HTML e-book from them. (This shows up on the site as a sizeable 'post-processing backlog' which is unlikely to be even partially addressed in the foreseeable future.) But as long as someone is willing to do the hard part of the job, 'DP' can also work quite well!
fouc 8y ago
I'm rather confused about this "reflowable" thing. Wouldn't the plain text itself be naturally reflowable, or wouldn't it be easy to automate that part?
- ptman 8y ago
  as opposed to PDF?
  - stakhanov 8y ago
    yeah, it's a technical term. for example the entire amazon kindle toolchain supports two approaches to doing an ebook. one is by converting a pdf (not reflowable), the other by converting a word or html file (reflowable). epub generally means reflowable, so what i said up there was a bit of a pleonasm. a non-reflowable ebook (i.e. stemming from a pdf) also behaves like a pdf on the reading device, e.g. you can "zoom" into sections of the page, but you can't change the font size and still have the text run from side-to-side without scrolling.
philippnagel 8y ago
Would love to get notified. My email address is public.
halfjew22 8y ago
I’m working on a new business model associated with knophy.com that will allow you to leave work as is while still earning compensation for your efforts. The prototype is being put together live at knophy.com and while it may not appear obvious from the site’s current status, I would love to talk with you about how your archival efforts would be greatly appreciated with us. Please reach out at my username at gmail if you’re interested.

marvindanig 8y ago

> Why do you have the restriction to original work and public domain work "with your own take"? Fixed and deployed. Yes, feel free to publish public domain works as you like it! > …regarding the royalties model that you're going to use. 15:85 for Bubblin:Creator using simple Stripe Connect. I'll be rolling out these pages in the next few hours.

stakhanov 8y ago
Cool! ...I like your level of responsiveness towards user suggestions :-)

Fang_ 8y ago

> One of my leisure time pursuits is to find interesting old books on cavalry Woah, that sounds cool! Do you have anything publicly available?

stakhanov 8y ago
I'm putting the finishing touches on my first one and should be able to release it over the next couple of weeks. It's the "Exercier-Reglement der K&K Cavallerie" from 1898, Habsburg-Austria's "answer" to the more well-known Prussian army riding instructions from 1882. I can post a link here when it's ready, in case you're interested (just bookmark this thread). -- It will be in German, though. (Maybe I'll get into the business of translating one day, but not as of now). I also have a second one in the pipeline, which is the aforementioned Prussian work (which eventually developed into the even more well-known HDV12 in its edition from 1937 that had a great deal of influence on the kind of dressage we see today). When I'm done with that, I've already collected the source material on the British "Cavalry Drill", also of 1898. That one will be in English, obviously, but have no clue on when it might be ready.

kevingrahl 8y ago

> One of my leisure time pursuits is to find interesting old books on cavalry, making them into high-quality reflowable e-books. That’s so cool! Is there any chance you’re willing to share those epub’s? I’m a private Archivist/Data Hoarder and would love to get my hands on those files just to keep them safe. Feel free to contact me, my email is on my profile.

stakhanov 8y ago
I'll definitely share the EPUBs. My current plan is roughly as follows: I'll create a Facebook group to serve as a "reading club" and publish the fulltext in a bit-by-bit fashion to the group as Facebook documents, maybe also to Bubblin at zero price. I like the idea of being able to link directly to individual pages within the Bubblin-based ebook. The usefulness of this feature depends a bit on how good the previews look that Facebook would end up extracting for those links. For people who want a more proper book experience there will be a ZIP file available for download with a printable PDF and an EPUB. I'll make that bundle available for purchase using a service similar to gumtree but better geared for the German market. My hope would be that, through these purchases, I can recoup some of the costs that went into the production of those works. After the reading club is through, or when I've made enough money to break even, whichever comes first, I'll upload the EPUB for free to Amazon, project gutenberg, archive.org, wikisource, wikimedia commons, and whatever other platform I can think of. I'll also upload the scanned source material to achive.org. I can send it to you as well, if you'd like, once I get to that stage. The baseline strategy here would be to just upload to Kindle Direct Publishing and put a price tag on it. But if I did that, then Amazon would stand to benefit from my efforts more than either I or the general public would, and it would probably not get the material as much circulation. So that's what I'm trying to avoid by doing things this way.
- MetalGuru 8y ago
  You’re awesome!
- halfjew22 8y ago
  I’ve been designing a new business model that is a positive sum game for all players. I’m sick of these rent seeking fee grabbing antiquated ideas prevailing just because “that’s how it’s always been done” I truly respect your efforts and wouldn’t comment here if I didn’t think I had a way to improve that process for you. Please email me if you’re interested in hearing more. Email is username at gmail. Looking forward to hopefully hearing from you.

zozbot123 8y ago

> One of my leisure time pursuits is to find interesting old books on cavalry, making them into high-quality reflowable e-books. ... Why not crowdfund this work, with a commitment to submitting it DRM-free to Project Gutenberg (or perhaps DP-EU, for works that PG cannot accept)? This pure 'sweat of the brow' work seems to be especially appropriate for crowdfunding, as opposed to plain old content protection.

Anthony-G 8y ago
I gather from their wonderful pseudonym that he/she has a different attitude to “sweat of the brow”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexey_Stakhanov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexey_Stakhanov
- stakhanov 8y ago
  haha, yeah, that's right about stakhanov. wikisource actually does crowdsource this type of work. regarding crowdfunding: it's not actually all that capital intensive and i prefer no capital and no responsibilities. otherwise i could get in trouble balancing responsibilities toward crowdfunding investors versus responsibilities toward the employer who i actually work for to pay my bills.
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    Crowdsourcing is also done by the 'distributed proofreaders' subproject of Project Gutenberg. It is an uncomfortable fact though that many 'DP' projects run aground without actually seeing a Project Gutenberg release, due to the lack of people who are willing to push the projects through and especially to 'post-process' them, i.e. take the proof-read and marked-up pages and actually create a final HTML e-book from them. (This shows up on the site as a sizeable 'post-processing backlog' which is unlikely to be even partially addressed in the foreseeable future.) But as long as someone is willing to do the hard part of the job, 'DP' can also work quite well!

fouc 8y ago

I'm rather confused about this "reflowable" thing. Wouldn't the plain text itself be naturally reflowable, or wouldn't it be easy to automate that part?

ptman 8y ago
as opposed to PDF?
- stakhanov 8y ago
  yeah, it's a technical term. for example the entire amazon kindle toolchain supports two approaches to doing an ebook. one is by converting a pdf (not reflowable), the other by converting a word or html file (reflowable). epub generally means reflowable, so what i said up there was a bit of a pleonasm. a non-reflowable ebook (i.e. stemming from a pdf) also behaves like a pdf on the reading device, e.g. you can "zoom" into sections of the page, but you can't change the font size and still have the text run from side-to-side without scrolling.

philippnagel 8y ago

Would love to get notified. My email address is public.

halfjew22 8y ago

I’m working on a new business model associated with knophy.com that will allow you to leave work as is while still earning compensation for your efforts. The prototype is being put together live at knophy.com and while it may not appear obvious from the site’s current status, I would love to talk with you about how your archival efforts would be greatly appreciated with us. Please reach out at my username at gmail if you’re interested.