Untapped: The Australian Literary Heritage Project is a great idea:
Most Australian books ever written are now out-of-print and inaccessible to readers. That includes local histories and memoirs, beloved children’s titles – and even winners of our most glittering literary prizes, such as the Miles Franklin Literary Award.
Untapped is a collaboration between authors, libraries and researchers, working together to identify Australia’s lost literary treasures and bring them back to life. It creates a new income source for Australian authors, who currently have few options for getting their out-of-print titles available in libraries. […]
We have worked with Australian authors, literary agents and estates to obtain the rights and digitise 161 culturally important out-of-print novels, histories, memoirs, poetry and more. They are available to borrow as ebooks from public libraries around the country, with our library partners promoting them so everyone has an opportunity to rediscover these texts. And they’re available for sale as ebooks too!
We used sophisticated scanning methods to copy the print book, then applied OCR to convert the text. After that, we used dedicated proof readers to pick up any errors and make sure the scan is of library quality. For that proofreading work, our focus was on hiring arts workers affected by COVID.
I discovered it at this MetaFilter post by mosessis, who included some of the results:
• There was substantial public demand to borrow these titles
• There was substantial public demand to purchase these titles
• There was no evidence that e-lending cannibalised book sales (and some evidence it may actually have increased them)
• The Untapped project generated around $120,000 in additional income for authors in the project’s first 12 months. All participants received ebook royalties from retail sales and library licensing.
• Libraries and publishers could both benefit from library control of e-lending infrastructure
I hope the wider world pays attention to the conclusion that e-lending doesn’t hurt book sales, which is what I would expect: many people who read a book and like it will want their own copy.
many people who read a book and like it will want their own copy.
Hear, hear.
I, for one, never trust that what’s on the web will stay there. There’s bit-rot, for small and low-budget websites, private or governmental; there are legal threats, like what the Internet Archive is facing; and there are business decisions by beady-eyed philistines, as customers of Netflix and other streaming movie services are discovering. Buy, download, and back up.
Yes indeed. This is why I keep buying DVD/Blu-rays despite the streaming phenomenon. (My brother used to be a fan of buying Amazon Prime movies until one of them disappeared — some rights thing? Now he’s back to physical media.)
there are business decisions by beady-eyed philistines, as customers of Netflix and other streaming movie services are discovering
Yup. Enshittification.
[Just looking at the WP page: it cites Cory Doctorow on Google’s rush to research an AI search chatbot, “a tool that won’t show you what you ask for, but rather, what it thinks you should see.” Indeed: the question that everyone should be asking with APEs/LLMs is L Cassius’ one: Cui bono? Hint: the answer is not “the users.”]
At the website, the page listing the books is clumsy and hard to scan quickly. It would have been better as a simple table: author, title, year of original publication (which is strangely absent). The pictures of the front covers are almost pointless as they are not the originals but fairly similar, genericised, unimpressive creations for their versions.
It is good that they have a mix of fiction and nonfiction.
As an Australian, I recognise the names of many of the authors and titles, although I have only read one of the books (according to my imperfect memory).