For me, living out side the Anglosphere, books on Kindle are a Godsend. Further, in our modern age, there can be little reason for a book not to be available on Kindle. Somebody has the text in a computer file, all you have to do is convert it.
That said, these books are not available on Kindle. Some are simply out of print, some are kept only as high-priced college textbooks. Some seem to be forgotten.
Three Corvettes (Monsarrat)
Here Lies Jim Crow (Smith)
The Social History of the Machine Gun (Ellis)
A Dog is Listening (Camar)
Schott’s Quintessential Miscellany (Schott)
The School of Women (Chariens)
This is Only a Test (Krugler)
Origins of the Korean War (Volumes One and Two) (Cummings)
The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs)
Books always went out of print. If they’re under copyright, a publisher has to determine who holds the rights (which is not always easy), and get permission from the copyright owner.
And older books may not have any electronic versions. Or the book is on 8 1/2" floppy disks running Apple DOS 3.3 and AppleWorks. It takes money to convert the files, and if the book doesn’t seem likely to make that back, there’s no real reason to do it.
Also very odd is that the Reginald Hill “Dalziel and Pascoe” books are available on Amazon UK but not on Amazon US (US has only 3 of the later books). If you buy from the UK store, they cannot be added to your US Kindle account (or I am not able to find how to do this). Very inconvenient.
Even with OCR it’s a time-consuming and expensive business to create a clean, validated electronic copy of book text. I was offered a couple of well-known sf book series at very favorable terms… but I had to assume the cost of digital conversion, and then the e-files belonged to the [del]author[/del] [del]publisher[/del] agent. It would have taken sales into the high “maybe…” range to make back that cost.
Book of Predictions? Really? I’ve had that book here in a file for a while, with the vague notion of going through and scoring the overall accuracy of the [del]profits[/del] prophets. Too tedious and angrifying a job…
Isaac Asimov was one of the most prolific authors of the 20th century. Yet very little of his work is available as eBooks. In my case, I wish I had copies of his F&SF essay collections.
I had trouble making it work. Also, calibre is fussy about importing books into its library. You can’t just process the book, but you have to deal with the whole library thing.
(The same problem pertains to the Kindle app on my Android. I don’t WANT them to import all my books; I want to control that solely myself.)
Anyway, I use Mobipocket Creator, which does much the same job, without being irksome.
Grin! Yes, that’s rough. There are several good and free OCR programs, so, with patience, you can get there.
pdfs on Kindle are annoying, because they’re exact images. If the image is larger than the page, you have to scroll left and right – for every single line! – to read it (or else scale it to fit…and then you can’t read the tiny tiny print!)
Most of R A Lafferty’s excellent SF is out of print in the US. I’ve got a pile of elderly paperbacks–many of which will fall apart with one more reading. Amazon UK has a wide selection of his stuff in Kindle format–only available to UK residents.
It’s a copyright issue; Lafferty’s heirs were a bunch of grand nieces & nephews who were not literary. So all his stuff went out of print. In the US, the Locus foundation bought those rights a few years back. So far, the only publications have been some excellent, beautiful, *expensive *story collections. There’s nothing available in Kindle format–except for a handful of Galaxy stories that somehow escaped to the public domain.
Occasionally one will read an article by one of the many SF authors to whom Lafferty was an inspiration; the scarcity of his work is always mentioned. Still, there’s no news about when electronic editions (or affordable paper ones) will be available in the country of his birth.
Many “classics” are available free online–at Gutenberg, etc. But Amazon often offers cheapo editions with proofreading, functional tables of contents & even a few illustrations; they’re generally worth the money. Pure OCR really sucks.
Which leaves many worthy books–not quite classic–that nobody’s bothered to publish electronically. Perhaps the rights are tied up. Or it’s not known whether there will be an audience. Often, “real” editions are cheap from independent sellers–but there goes that “simplify my life” thing…
Bummer! I love that bloke! “Among the Hairy Earthmen” is one of the best historical fantasy stories ever ever ever!
Alas, Gutenberg, too, has let some shoddy work slip past. But, yeah, when someone charges money for it, we have the right to expect some effort at cleaning it up.
Also, let me throw in a plug for Project Gutenberg Australia, which often has material the U.S. site doesn’t. Some darn fine, jolly good stuff! (I didn’t know until just now, when I searched, that there’s also a Canadian site.)
It’s a quirkily designed program, but it does seem to handle the various formats consistently. I use it mostly for proofing to the AZW3 level.
I do find it odd that there are almost no professional/commercial tools for creating and managing ebooks. It’s shareware/freeware or… Kindle’s closed process.
OCR, however, is only step one. Someone has to proof the material endlessly to remove glitches, misreadings and errors. It’s clear when you’re reading a book that was hastily converted from paper, especially if you’re familiar with it already; absurd errors abound.
There are ways to fix this, although nothing turns simple page images into flowing text. Remember that there’s two kinds of PDFs - live ones and scanned images.
I actually use Kindle on Android to present PDF presentations, since Reader is so badly wrought for that platform.
Kindle unfortunately was built and optimized for the E-Z-MS Word “publisher,” unfortunately, and it can be a bitch to beat it into (professional) submission. I usualy use InDesign -> EPUB -> Kindle/Calibre MOBI -> Calibre AZW3 and final Kindle submission. I have mastered the process of overriding default formatting at the EPUB level, which gives great flexibility.
But the takeaway here is that the tools and the process could be a hell of a lot more accessible to the novice and controllable by the pro.
I’ve picked up OCR’d versions of classics that still have errors, and wound up fixing them as I read. But then I had no idea where to re-release them with the fixes.
I’d like the excellent pro wrestling biography “Have a Nice Day: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks” by Mick Foley (Mankind) to come out on Kindle, but alas, thus far it has not.
