So whenever I watch a TV series I always see if there are comic books or novels based on them and once I found out the TNBC sitcom California Dreams had several of them I started buying them only to find out more than half of them are insanely rare and hard to find(at least to buy, we'll get to that)and searching for them on Ebay is difficult since some of the titles are the same as other completely unrelated books. Looking through Abebooks I found out they also came out in Germany under other titles but as I don't know German and can't afford to pay someone to translate them that does me no good. However looking through Worldcat I did notice that some libraries around the world do carry them so i'm wondering if anyone on here can see if any libraries near them have these books and if they do check them out and scan them and post them online(after all it's not like these are going to be getting official ebook releases anytime soon). The last one I can get online is like 30 bucks on Ebay.
The ones I need are Beauty and the Blues, Power of Love, Don't Forget to Write, A California Night's Dream and Dreamers and Schemers. Any assistance would be appreciated, to see if libraries near you have them just use Worldcat: Worldcat
There's also another possibility, one of my contacts on TV Vault actually lives in Germany and the books over there are way cheaper(with them even releasing two novels in one book for convenience)so he might be able to translate them for me if he's fluent in German(or knows someone that is)so I asked him if he could possibly do that for me. fingers crossed.
OK I talked to my guy in Germany and he said that while he does not speak German that well, he does know people that do, but he said that translating all those books could get costly(we're talking like hundreds of dollars per book potentially) So I took the liberty of setting up a GoFundMe page to help pay for English translations of these rare books: GoFundMe
So just give what you can if you feel like donating, every little bit helps.
OK I decided to cancel the fundraiser as my contact got back to me and said nobody he knows is interested in doing those books for less than a thousand dollars, so it looks like at this point i'll have to import the books and do the translation myself using Google Translate.
Well I bit the bullet and bought all the books in Germany for about 40 bucks, probably going to be a while before they arrive though(estimate is late January early February) translating them is going to be a royal pain but with me not being able to afford a translator i'm stuck between a rock and a hard place so i've got no choice but to do it myself. Not going to be the most accurate translation but i'll be good enough for now until proper English versions of those novels are found.
Good news two of the novels have arrived a lot sooner than expected and I fully expect to third to be here any day now. Guess i'll get started on translating them.
The third book arrived and today I managed to scan one of them completely and started scanning another, I intend to finish them by sunday night hopefully. The online translator i'm using isn't perfect though and once i've scanned all the books and converted the scanned images to text format and done the initial online translations for all of them, i'll likely end up using spellcheck to identify any errors in the translated text files and then go to the corresponding pages in the novel with the problem sentences and type them up manually into Google Translate for a more accurate translation(originally I intended to manually type every page in every one of the books but someone on another site told me scanning the pages would be more efficient so I abandoned that plan) and fix them in the text docs until the stories look properly translated. This is tedious work but them's the breaks when you're doing a passion project like this, ah well it gives me a chance to finally catch up on some podcasts at least.
OK been working on translating the first book and using Google Translate seems to be doing it's job pretty well.
managed to scan and upload the one U.S. release of a latter CD novel that I actually managed to get on Ebay-The Dream Team: The Dream Team
Also in a stroke of luck I managed to actually find an English version of A California Night's Dream from Etsy, cost me quite a bit but I just got paid so I figured I might as well, it's not like I can count on a cheaper version coming up for sale anytime soon so my back was against a wall. It was worth it since that's one less book to translate and I should be able to sell it for quite a bit on Ebay anyways.
Found another one of those missing novels for sale, the final one Dreamers and Schemers, there are two copies for sale on Amazon and hoo boy both are even more pricey then the last one I bought, it's over 200 for the cheaper of the two copies, but that's still nothing compared to the 800 bucks that one guy spent on that Seinfeld script and my birthday is fortunately coming up soon so guess i'll be saving up to preserve some more lost media.
Got an Amazon gift card for my birthday and got paid today so I was finally able to buy a copy of "Dreamers and Schemers", not counting the gift card I spent almost 150 bucks on that book, by far the most expensive thing i've bought in the name of preserving lost media but it was worth it. I know i've been slacking off on scanning and uploading rare books onto IA lately but as soon as this particular book arrives i'll definitely make scanning and uploading it my top priority.