I tend to think it is pointless to try to keep an updated list of safe
publishers. There are so many small publishers that have come and gone.
Authors self publish and make up a name for their publishing company and
the publisher then publishes one book. Very many publishers start out
and then after publishing a handful of books they run out of money and
go under. It would be pretty much impossible to keep track of all these
publishers or so-called publishers. Your best bet is to check the list
of partner publishers on the Bookshare site and if a publisher is not
listed then you can tentatively consider that a safe publisher. I say
tentatively because even that is not reliable. Many of these publishers
have imprints and if you look at the copyright or title page there is
often no indication that the publisher named has a parent company that
may be on that list. It would help if we had a list of imprints, but
that would be unreliable too. For one thing, these partner publishers
have the right to not provide any book that they have published and they
exercise that right and there seems to be no way of predicting which
books they are willing to supply and which ones they are not willing to
provide. In addition to that, there are a lot of out of print books from
these publishers that are old enough that there is no electronic file
for them. No matter what the publisher is those should be safe. Then
there are the publishers that have not signed the Bookshare agreement
and then sign at a later time. Trying to find safe publishers from that
realm is unreliable too. For example, I was right in the middle of
working on a Penguin book when we were told that Penguin had signed. I
was working on it a little bit every day and when the Penguin books
started rolling in I checked every day to see if they had beaten me to
it. When I finished they had not yet supplied the book and so I
submitted it. By the time it was proofread, though, Penguin had added
the book. The solution that I have arrived at is risky, but everything
else seems to be risky too. That is, I just check the collection and if
it is not there I consider it fair game. I do, however, try to find
books that are obscure, the more obscure the better. For example, the
last book I submitted was a book published by International Publishers.
That is the publishing wing of the Communist Party, USA. I looked it up
on Goodreads.com and even though it was published in 1999 absolutely no
one had ever added it to their shelves on Goodreads. Now that was
obscure. The one I am scanning now was published by what I think may be
a major publisher, but would be an imprint. That is, the publisher
printed on the copyright page is one that I never heard of, but the ISBN
begins with 0307. 0307 starts out the ISBNs of Grand Central Publishers
for one thing and, I think, some other major publishers. Looking it up
on Goodreads, though, shows me that it is only slightly more popular
than the last one I scanned. It was also published in the 1990s and in
all that time only one person had added it to their shelves. No one had
marked it as having been read. That is obscure enough that I think it is
probably safe. Then there are publishers that are really not much more
than printing services. Examples are Vantage Publishers or Author House.
They will publish anything as long as they are paid to publish them.
That is, they charge the author to print up his or her book and then
deliver the printed books to the author and let him or her worry about
marketing and distribution. What it comes down to is that the books are
self published and the self publishing author just pays the company to
turn his manuscript into books. I am fairly confident that those books
are safe for scanning. I can find them by entering the terms Vantage or
AuthorHouse in the publisher field in the advanced search page of
PaperbackSwap.com. When looking them up on Goodreads those will most
often show as never having been read by Goodreads users too.
Nevertheless, any book we scan is a risk. We take some amount of a
chance that every submission we make is going to be replaced.
On 12/31/2015 1:29 AM, Cindy Rosenthal wrote:
I tried to copy and save as a word file an old publisher list with what would be safe to scan and not. I'm not sure I was successful in changing the file to Word file. I've attached it but if it's still HTML or gobbledygook .... In any case it's very old and should be dated and made available to us as a Word file or rtf file that can then we changed to a Word file
Cindy
