POSTING OLD BOOKS
My goal is to use Adobe Acrobat Pro 7 to post all of
ICE's materials on-line. The new Acrobat allows the
posting of documents in their original format. This means
that my pre-1998 on-line books will retain their original
pagination. They will be in PDF format, which Google
recognizes and automatically converts into HTML.
I have used DjVu in the past. It works. But the
product is proprietary, and Google and other search engines
don't recognize its text, unlike PDF files. So, I will
abandon the old DjVu format as soon as I can. I will have
to re-scan the old books, one by one.
I bought a new scanner to do this, the Plustek
OptiBook 3600. It's a $250 scanner -- a bit on the high
side. It scans faster than most, and it has this great
feature: you can scan a book without pushing it flat in the
middle. The scanner lets you hang the pages of a book over
the scanner's left edge, requiring only a 45-degree angle
to scan a page instead of 180 degrees (flat). This reduces
pressure on the book's binding. It also allows clean,
easy, one-page-at-a-time scanning.
You should consider setting up a cheap website on
http://1and1.com or some other $5/month web host service.
Then scan in and post old books of value that are not yet
on-line. In the United States, anything published prior to
1923 is in the public domain. Also, anything published
before 1964 that was not renewed in year 28 is in the
public domain. This means most books are in the public
domain. The Library of Congress will search this for $75
per pre-1964 book.
I would recommend posting books with a common theme.
You can break up your site into several sections, each with
one theme.
There are many books that deserve to be made available
to the world. If you posted just one per month, that would
be a great service.
Machen's NEW TESTAMENT GREEK FOR BEGINNERS was
published in 1922. Macmillan owned the copyright. It
cranked out a reprint every year. The money kept coming
in. Today, someone should get a copy of the first edition
and post it on the Web.
Thee PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW should be on-line.
I have dozens of issues. I plan to post them eventually if
no one else does. I will try to fill in any missing issues
if I can locate a library that has a complete set.
Other old journals should be on-line. So should
diaries, letters, and other previously unpublished
documents.
The Banner of Truth should not let any of its titles
go out of print. If there is not enough demand to keep a
book in print on a Print-on-Demand basis -- one copy at a
time -- then it ought to be posted on-line.
Eventually, an outfit like Still Waters Revival Books
will face competition. Everything that it publishes will
be on-line for free. It is as easy to scan an old book as
to photocopy it. It is far easier and faster to post it
on-line than to put it in a spiral binder. Cost of
mailing: zero. Cost of materials for the publisher: zero.
Inventory taxes: zero. If I had the "free" time or
motivation, I would simply post every Still Waters Revival
Books reprint in my collection. Anyone can do this.
Why seminaries don't do this is beyond me. They have
libraries filled with old books. They should have a
required one-credit course on how to do this. The course
would assign a task to students as part of their graduation
requirement: create a web site and post one assigned book
per week beginning in week three of the course. Let each
student begin a career of public domain publishing. Every
well-educated pastor should know how to do this. The
seminary library can then use the students' scanned-in PDF
files to post on its website.
Toner is cheap. Paper is cheap. Readers can print
out an old book and read it. But they don't. They suffer
from what I call Picard's syndrome.
http://shurl.org/picard
They want a "real book" in their hands. This is a
testament to the screening power of editorial committees
and publishers for 550 years. Older readers still cannot
break free. But those who grew up using the web surely
can, and have.
There really are people who will not print out a book,
no matter how important they think it is. I hear from one
every month. I tell them about
www.freebooks.com. Free is
not good enough for them. They expect me to shell out
$5,000 to print 2500 copies, pay to store them in
inventory, and mail them, one by one, to one buyer per
month (maximum) -- just because they have an incurable case
of Picard's syndrome.
The world is not going to be transformed by people
this tied to the gatekeeper's world of Gutenberg. We must
learn how to use the Web for publishing purposes. Gary
DeMar's American Vision is making great strides in this
regard.
http://americanvision.org
The world has changed because of the Internet. We
must change with it or else wind up like dinosaurs.
As a good example of how to use the Web, take a look
at a variant of a TV ad that was popular a couple of years
ago. For those of you who live outside the U.S., this is
an example of a clever ad that actually sells the product.
Very few clever ads do.
http://www.bytesend-inc.com/fun/stanlet.htm
