Karen GoatKeeper's Blog - Posts Tagged "botany-books"
Changes In Finding Books
Before the internet, before Amazon, finding a new book to read was different in many ways. I remember going to the library or a bookstore to look for one.
First I sought out the genre sections I preferred. Next I stood in front of shelves of books reading over the titles until one sounded interesting enough to pull off the shelf. If the book had a dust jacket, the book summary was read. If there was no dust jacket, perhaps a couple of pages were looked at, if no one was looking. Such reading was discouraged in book stores.
There was no cover art on hard copy books except on a dust jacket. There were no sample pages. There were no lists of reviews unless it was being touted by the store in a big display.
Some of that changed when paperback books became more popular. Then as now the cover art did not necessarily fit the book. The book summaries usually did.
One other clue to a book was found in newspapers. They had book reviewers who wrote columns about new books.
Otherwise you bought or checked out a book pretty much in the dark about what the book was about or how the author wrote. Established authors ruled supreme. New authors were risky.
Amazon and ebooks changed that. Now an author is supposed to get lots of reviews even before the book is officially available. The first part of the book is available for reading.
And I am left with a dilemma.
My botanist friend has four very serious botany books. One might be an interesting botanical tale. He has the books printed and would like to sell them to other botanists who might find them useful.
Serious publishers of such books turned him down. He has all the degrees and the background to write these books. He doesn’t have a university affiliation.
That leaves me.
He doesn’t understand how Amazon has changed the book world and I need sample pages from his books. The Table of Contents should suffice.
So I am left scanning pages from the books. My scanner isn’t set up to scan from a book so the pages come out with a dusty grey coloring in the background. This makes them difficult to read. I spend the hours to change the background back to white.
Three books are done. I’m working on the fourth.
Why bother? One short one is how a misleading name was given to an American milkweed. One is about the milkweed species of the United States. It gives the history, the biology and his personal research and photographs of each drawn from years of work and thousands of miles of travel. Two others are translations of important botanical papers written in German and previously unavailable to those not fluent in botanical German which is very different from conversational German so internet translations don’t work.
These are important works. So I keep working on the sample pages. And wishing the Table of Contents was sufficient.
First I sought out the genre sections I preferred. Next I stood in front of shelves of books reading over the titles until one sounded interesting enough to pull off the shelf. If the book had a dust jacket, the book summary was read. If there was no dust jacket, perhaps a couple of pages were looked at, if no one was looking. Such reading was discouraged in book stores.
There was no cover art on hard copy books except on a dust jacket. There were no sample pages. There were no lists of reviews unless it was being touted by the store in a big display.
Some of that changed when paperback books became more popular. Then as now the cover art did not necessarily fit the book. The book summaries usually did.
One other clue to a book was found in newspapers. They had book reviewers who wrote columns about new books.
Otherwise you bought or checked out a book pretty much in the dark about what the book was about or how the author wrote. Established authors ruled supreme. New authors were risky.
Amazon and ebooks changed that. Now an author is supposed to get lots of reviews even before the book is officially available. The first part of the book is available for reading.
And I am left with a dilemma.
My botanist friend has four very serious botany books. One might be an interesting botanical tale. He has the books printed and would like to sell them to other botanists who might find them useful.
Serious publishers of such books turned him down. He has all the degrees and the background to write these books. He doesn’t have a university affiliation.
That leaves me.
He doesn’t understand how Amazon has changed the book world and I need sample pages from his books. The Table of Contents should suffice.
So I am left scanning pages from the books. My scanner isn’t set up to scan from a book so the pages come out with a dusty grey coloring in the background. This makes them difficult to read. I spend the hours to change the background back to white.
Three books are done. I’m working on the fourth.
Why bother? One short one is how a misleading name was given to an American milkweed. One is about the milkweed species of the United States. It gives the history, the biology and his personal research and photographs of each drawn from years of work and thousands of miles of travel. Two others are translations of important botanical papers written in German and previously unavailable to those not fluent in botanical German which is very different from conversational German so internet translations don’t work.
These are important works. So I keep working on the sample pages. And wishing the Table of Contents was sufficient.
