- Report: #563244
Complaint Review: General Books LLC - watertown Internet
Reported By:
Gary -
Dedham, Massachusetts, United States of America
Submitted:
Updated:
-
Author Not Confirmed
Why?
General Books LLC
watertown, Internet, United States of America
Phone:
Web:
www.general-books.net
Categories:
Business Rating:
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General Books LLC How it's done - Google and Internet Archive book ripoffs watertown, Internet
First off, I'm a retired librarian, archivist and experienced in digital imaging and PDF creation (scanning, photography, PDF creation, POD publishing) both as a profession and as a hobby.
So how does General Books and other similar setups do their stuff? Easy. Download a pdf from Google or the Internet Archive. Process through Acrobat (sorry, I'm not going to go into the specifics as that would simply further propagate the whole ripoff system) to create a relatively clean PDF. For an ebook, if it's not already available, run OCR through either Acrobat, ABBYY FineReader, LuraSoft or your OCR engine of choice. Extract the text layer and send your book to a Print On Demand outfit and presto, you have a flawed book.
Or, simply extract and clean the Google Books or Internet Archive pdf, create a new document in a desk top publishing program (complete with facing margins, gutters, margins, etc), Distill it in Acrobat and there you go, a press ready pdf for your POD printer of choice.
For the record, I do quality facsimile reproductions of books and journals... all from material in my personal collection or as a consultant. Let me tell you, no one and I mean no one could possibly produce as many titles as General Books, or any of the other multitude of scams out there and still make any money at it. It takes an inordinate amount of time to image, proof, photoshop, compile and edit a book. And... I do some books from scratch on my own and some I send out to a service for digitizing to TIFF, from which I produce the reprint.
Take a look at ABE.com and you'll see the rampant spread of this new scam. I do predict that, given time, these companies will fail and disappear from the books marketplace.
So how does General Books and other similar setups do their stuff? Easy. Download a pdf from Google or the Internet Archive. Process through Acrobat (sorry, I'm not going to go into the specifics as that would simply further propagate the whole ripoff system) to create a relatively clean PDF. For an ebook, if it's not already available, run OCR through either Acrobat, ABBYY FineReader, LuraSoft or your OCR engine of choice. Extract the text layer and send your book to a Print On Demand outfit and presto, you have a flawed book.
Or, simply extract and clean the Google Books or Internet Archive pdf, create a new document in a desk top publishing program (complete with facing margins, gutters, margins, etc), Distill it in Acrobat and there you go, a press ready pdf for your POD printer of choice.
For the record, I do quality facsimile reproductions of books and journals... all from material in my personal collection or as a consultant. Let me tell you, no one and I mean no one could possibly produce as many titles as General Books, or any of the other multitude of scams out there and still make any money at it. It takes an inordinate amount of time to image, proof, photoshop, compile and edit a book. And... I do some books from scratch on my own and some I send out to a service for digitizing to TIFF, from which I produce the reprint.
Take a look at ABE.com and you'll see the rampant spread of this new scam. I do predict that, given time, these companies will fail and disappear from the books marketplace.
3 Updates & Rebuttals
Groberts
Dedham,Massachusetts,
United States of America
More on Google Book Scams
#2Author of original report
Wed, February 10, 2010
That is absolutely correct. I produce high quality facsimile reprints of 18th and 19th century books that I personally own. People who buy my reprints know me and know that what they are getting is the best that can currently be produced by digital reproduction systems such as Kirtas, Minolta and Epson.
General Books, Kessinger, A1Books, to name just a few, represent their products as coming from their personal libraries. Which is, of course, a lot of hooey. Google is now hooked up with the Espresso Book Machine, which basically means that anyone who has access to a store holding one of these machines can purchase a hard copy of anything in Google Books. True, the quality will be deplorable but the prices are reasonable.
Searching ABE, Alibris, Amazon, etc. for quality antiquarian books is now very difficult, so much so that book dealers are suffering the loss of business as their goods are buried under the ridiculous number of Google/Internet Archive scams. All that said, I still predict that this particular scam will self-destruct, given enough time. Sure, there will be rubes who buy copies, but not enough to keep the momentum going. Or, Google and the Internet Archive will take action at some point.
There is a good liklihood that one of these scam companies will issue a reprint of a book that is held by a known company, such as Wiley and that they will be prosecuted. Hopefully. In the meantime, all that happens is consumers get taken to the cleaners.
PeterR
United KingdomResponse
#3Consumer Comment
Wed, February 10, 2010
Actually no, from what he says Gary is in a very different business. He produces quality facsimiles from books he owns which actually involve real work in production and are as readable as possible. Having done a facsimile of a 17th century book myself I know what he means - had I been working at it full time I reckon the amount of time expended on retouching etc for clarity would have been about 3 weeks!
General Books are able to flood Amazon, ABEBooks etc with relatively cheap but potentially inaccurate OCR reprints, which damages the market for genuinely rare books.
kitefisher
United States of AmericaWhere's the victim in this scam?
#4Consumer Comment
Mon, February 08, 2010
Why is the re-printing and re-publishing of probably, mostly public domain titles a scam? I don't see anyone being defrauded by re-purposing old books into something new and readable.
Are you upset because you seemingly believe that General Books (GB) couldn't possibly have the financial wherewithal to secure such large numbers of the original antique texts or the manpower to digitize and re-publish them? Maybe they don't, maybe they do.
Surely, you must be familiar with the wealth of really cheap, computer-literate labor on the Asian sub-continent and elsewhere around the globe.
Are you upset because you feel GB must be milking the resources of Google and the Internet Archive amongst probably a large number of other online repositories? But again where's the scam?
By your own admittance, you appear to be engaged in the same activity as that which you've taken GB to task. Does General Book's scope of production make them culpable in something nefarious or criminal; but, somehow to a lesser extent, you, engaged in the same business, are innocent of any possible wrong-doing?
Say for instance, GB is counterfeiting $100 bills and you are at home printing out bogus $1 bills on a part-time basis, are you somehow not so guilty of exactly the same offense? I'm certain the Secret Service, in this case, would take a very dim view of both counterfeit operations.
Google makes their billions in revenue with the advertising that's right there along side EVERY page of EVERY book, magazine and etc. that they digitize. It's really hard to see that they are somehow short-changed and losing here.
There's millions of books being destroyed every day by neglect or willful intention. I for one, am glad that there are publishers out there doing their best to save so much good reading from the local landfill.
