This blog was set up originally to let the world know about the books and other products that Half Red House Books sells. As we are unfortunately unable to sell books at this time, its purpose is converted to blogging about books, bookselling, the public domain and related issues.
A favorite book from my father’s childhood in the early 20th century was Billy Popgun by Milo Winter. All the used copies currently available are very expensive, and I thought I’d scan in my mouse-chewed copy of the book so that children and adults of the 21st century could enjoy it too. The text and the incredible illustrations are available now, as a small, low-resolution PDF file, as a 4MB high-resolution PDF file, and as an html file. I’ve scanned in another childhood favorite, “Clematis” by Bertha and Ernest Cobb, and you can see the results here. Also, My Mother’s bio and her book Yaqui Myths and Legends can be read here.Other projects we’re involved in include radio podcasts, the development of an international auxiliary language called Ayola, and a library of video lectures.
Books are a time-honored way of distributing and reading text that has not been superseded even in the 21st century. Buying a cheap book (or a new one of an expensive used book for that matter) is a reliable way of getting hold of the text you want to read in a package that is the right size and shape to hold and peruse. Nevertheless, there are ways of getting hold of the text you want without any significant amount of money changing hands. These include public libraries, free exchange tables, internet book-swapping sites and ebooks
The Main Disadvantage
One disadvantage of most free books is that reselling them is either illegal or next to impossible. As Gern pointed out in a comment on the earlier post on getting cheap books, some people have good reasons for wanting to get a valuable or aesthetically pleasing book rather than just any readable copy. I’d add that some people seek out cheap books in hopes of finding one that is undervalued and reselling it at a large profit. My guess is that you’d do better to go to auctions and estate sales to dig up that kind of “find” than to look at the offerings on the Web these days. The fact is that most online book dealers know very well what the books they offer are selling for, within a few dollars. Free books are often marked (labelled) in such a way as to discourage resale, and most of them are not in prime condition.
Online Book Swapping
If you want to trade books, there are several internet sites devoted to ways of doing so. BookCrossing.com provides a special way of marking books and “setting them free in the world”, and BookMooch.com helps you exchange books by mail.
Ebooks (especially public domain)
If you are looking for the contents of a book and you have a computer or similar device handy, you may be able to read what you want free. Ebooks come in a variety of forms. Increasingly, if the book is in public domain (published before 1923, purposely placed in public domain, or fallen into public domain by accident), you can be pretty sure of finding the text online somewhere free of charge. Project Gutenberg, Google Books, and other sites offer access to them. Google Books even lets you look at selected chapters of copyrighted books, though it’s not clear how long that practice can last. Some e-books are in formats that can be read on highly-portable devices such as palm-pilots as well as on computer displays.
Public Libraries
One of the few socialist institutions in the US is the public library. If you want a specific book for a limited period of time, and if you are not in a desperate hurry to get it, you can probably get hold of it at your local public library or via interlibrary loan at no cost. If you want to search libraries across the country from your computer, you can get pointers at Libraryspot.com. IPL.org tries to emulates a public library on line, with links to freely available resources.
Free-exchange Tables
Your local recycling center or food bank probably has an area where reusable goods can be dropped off for re-use, and these typically have an interesting variety of books.
[NB: This was posted in 2007, when I was selling books at halfredhouse.biz . Unfortunately, I am currently unable to sell books at this location, and must ask you to disregard references to books for sale.]
While I would love to have you buy books from me directly or via Biblio.com , I think it’s only fair to point you to some resources for finding cheap books that are actually cheap and are likely to really be available.
The first thing to do is price-comparison, and the best place to do that is at Fetchbook.info. They list books by Title, Auther and ISBN and provide a list of online booksellers that have a copy for sale, ordered by price. They have a neat feature that gives you the total price of the book with shipping to your location.
Nevertheless, if you find the book you want listed for a penny or thirty-nine cents, there are some other things to consider before ordering it.
Remember that even if there is an online bookstore listing the book you want for one cent, there is always a shipping fee. In the US, if you buy one book and have it shipped by media mail, a fair price for shipping is $3.00. Overseas shipping is almost always by airmail only, and from the US it may average $9.00 . Some dealers, including certain very large operations, count on their shipping fees to make a decent profit on books they price at a penny; if the dealer asks for $6.00 per book for ground shipping, buying from that dealer is probably a bad deal. Buying from a dealer who is not only in the same country but in the same region of the country is usually a good deal, since ground shipping will be faster.
Often dealers with lots of penny books are also highly unreliable in other ways. Some list books they don’t actually have in stock but expect to order from another source and drop-ship if someone orders one; this can mean delays of weeks or months and frequent cancelled orders.
Bookseller ratings may or may not be helpful; I don’t trust them much. Dealers who list on eBay or Amazon.com receive ratings based on customer feedback; these ratings are subjective, so you need to look not only at the quality rating, but also at the number of customers who have provided feedback.
Fetchbooks rates agencies, not individual dealers, based on their “fulfillment rate”, the number of orders successfully filled. These ratings are not very useful for sites like Biblio.com, which list a large number of dealers whose performance varies widely.
Sites like AbeBooks.com, Biblio.com and Alibris.com rate booksellers based on the number of orders fulfilled. Again, you need to look at the volume of orders as well as the raw rating: My rating at Biblio looks pretty poor this month, but I have filled most of the orders I have received very promptly and satisfactorily. The poor rating reflects the fact that during a power outage, I lost some information from my database and ended up continuing to list several books I had already sold. Because I had a very low volume of sales, unfulfilled orders for two of these books dragged my rating way down.
When ordering books, I find it more reliable to look at the bookseller’s online store for evidence that it is run by a human being or that it is tied to a “brick-and-mortar” store that has a good reputation. Again this is subjective, but if you’re like me you probably trust your own subjectivity more than someone else’s and more than mechanically-generated ratiings. Trust your intuition or the Force, or whatever…
If cheapness is not your only criterion in chosing a copy of a book, you may want to look for expertise. I’m happy to give advice about what I know, but for book-collecting expertise, I recommend going to the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA) or one of its international affiliates. Look up an ABAA bookseller who specializes in the kind of book you are looking for and ask for advice. The members of this organization have been in the used book business longer than I have and are generally very helpful. Prices at their bookstores are likely to be higher, and things like edition numbers and peculiar bindings matter to them in ways that they don’t matter to most cheap-book-buyers (most of us, I suspect).
Please feel free to ask me about anything remotely related to this book business. If I don’t know the answer, I’ll tell you, but I may have run across exactly the information you’re looking for. I am a human being and generally well-liked by people I see regularly 
Escuche la entrevista de hoy miércoles 27 de febrero: Desapariciones e Impunidad: ¡El Pan Diario de Colombia! En la entrevista especial hecha a Diana Marcela Gómez quien es miembro activo de Hijos e Hijas por la Memoria y Contra la Impunidad
Escuche el segmento ¡Nuestras Voces! el próximo miércoles 5 de marzo de 2008 a las 11:00am.
Lindolfo Carballo
Equipo ¡Nuestras Voces!
¡Un Mundo Mejor es Necesario y Urgente!
Escuche la entrevista especial de hoy: Liberar a los Cinco: ¡Un Deber Humano!, entrevista hecha a Gloria La Riva actualmente candidata a la presidencia de los EEUU por el Partido Socialismo y Liberación, además es la Coordinadora del Comité Nacional para Liberar a los Cinco Cubanos que están presos injustamente en las cárceles de los Estados Unidos de Norte América desde 1998
Escúchenos todos lo miércoles a las 11:00am a través del 91.5FM para el área del Valle Merrimack y para el resto del mundo a través del www.wuml.org
–
Lindolfo Carballo
Equipo ¡Nuestras Voces!
¡Un Mundo Mejor es Necesario y Urgente!
On WUML’s longest-running folk-based program Almost Acoustic, with Tracy Milton, there was a live performance Saturday, February 23 by local performer Dale Reynolds (http://www.myspace.com/dalereynolds). The WUML podcast site has been down for a couple of weeks and may be down for a few more, so I’m posting the live on-air performance here until it can be moved bac to that site. On his Myspace page, you can read about an upcoming benetfit for the recent massive fire in Lawrence and about his March 20 CD release party at the Tupelo Music Hall (http://www.tupelohall.com/music_hall/Shows/032008.htm)
Also, in an effort to fulfill a request from Blue at BlueMountain Music ( http://www.myspace.com/bluemtnmusi), I made a request for something about cold and ice and snow for her. The request got sort of garbled, but I’m also posting it as a separate mp3 file below, along with a recitation of Robert Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee”. Enjoy!
PS:
Here’s a song that might be apropos:
The Frozen Logger
James Stevens
As I sat down one evening within a small cafe,
A forty year old waitress to me these words did say:
“I see that you are a logger, and not just a common bum,
‘Cause nobody but a logger stirs his coffee with is thumb.
My lover was a logger, there’s none like him today;
If you’d pour whiskey on it he could eat a bale of hay
He never shaved his whiskers from off of his horny hide;
He’d just drive them in with a hammer and bite them off inside.
My lover came to see me upon one freezing day;
He held me in his fond embrace which broke three vertebrae.
He kissed me when we parted, so hard that he broke my jaw;
I could not speak to tell him he’d forgot his mackinaw.
I saw my lover leaving, sauntering through the snow,
Going gaily homeward at forty-eight below.
The weather it tried to freeze him, it tried its level best;
At a hundred degrees below zero, he buttoned up his vest.
It froze clean through to China, it froze to the stars above;
At a thousand degrees below zero, it froze my logger love.
They tried in vain to thaw him, and would you believe me, sir
They made him into axeblades, to chop the Douglas fir.
And so I lost my lover, and to this cafe I come,
And here I wait till someone stirs his coffee with his thumb.”
Dale Reynolds in Studio Almost Acoustic WUML 2008-02-23: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download A song about coldness for Blue: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Servce from Librivox: Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadEscuche el programa especial ¿Hay Esperanzas en El Salvador contra la Impunidad? - El segmento “Nuestras Voces” del programa “Pensando en Voz Alta” es una producción de todos los miércoles en vivo de Lindolfo Carballo, Alma Couverthié, Marcos Brito & Jim Giddings. En esta edición especial entrevistamos a Rosa Marina Manzanares Monjarás conocida cariñosamente como “MARIPOSA” sobre la horrible tortura y asesinados de sus padres Francisco Manzanares y Juana Monjarás el 2 de julio de 2006 así como el asesinato de su hermano Paco Cutumay el 8 de octubre de 1996. La canciíon Barrios Unidos Train fue extraída del disco Movimiento Music del Dr. Locos’ Rocking Jalapeño Band. La Canción dedicada a MARIPOSA fue extraída del sitio Web http://www.lloviznandocantos.org/index.htm y la canción Patria Chiquita Mía fue extraída del disco Alma Revolucionaria Vol. 2. – Escuche nuestra próxima edición el miércoles 28 de noviembre de 2007 11:00am a 12:00 del mediodía a través del www.wuml.org ó si vive en el área de Lowell, Massachusetts en el 91.5FM. También se puede comunicar con nuestro equipo a través de NuestrasVocesRadio@gmail.com
Post questions about books, magazines, ephemera, pamphlets or anything remotely related to them as responses to this post, and we’ll respond here as best we can.