Publishers in the US are ignoring a large market for historical non fiction on royalty in ebook format. Yes there are lots of available historical novels or the gossip laden tomes on Diana, Princess of Wales. These are not the focus or purpose of this blog.
I'm interested in seeing those really great, expensive to ship over seas or 'hard to find in print' books that have historical importance. It is frustrating to see these books beginning to appear in the UK Amazon store for Kindle while being delayed more than a year or not appearing at all in the U.S. store. Yes it's possible to hack your Kindle or provide an address in the UK but that is not the point. These books have historical value to everyone.
Why on Kindle? It's the only E-reader I own and Amazon has the better selection. We're just not there with a full cross platform database where you can purchase from anywhere.
I've had some success requesting books be made available for Kindle but just how publishers make decisions on what books to bring to the e-format is not clear. I've also had some luck contacting publishers and authors on my own but finding who owns the rights or how to contact them can be impossible or difficult. Not all publishing houses respond to inquiries, either.
Once you've requested a book it is almost impossible with Amazon to track if a book does become available. Books that are out of copyright are too often uncorrected OCR scans that have no table of contents and are harder to locate due to obscurity.
This blog and twitter account will document the progress on books I've researched and pass that on to other fans. I plan on looking only for books related to international royalty, biographies and memoirs only. If you have a book you'd like to add to the list in the genre, please comment!
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