Why CDs?  Why not "real" books?

Answer:  We sell our material in CD-ROM form only, although we confess to a real love for old books ourselves.  There are many reasons that we currently sell only on CD-ROM.  See the answer to the next question for some of them.

For people who simply do not find a CD-ROM as an acceptable substitute for the original book, we do understand!  For these people, we are happy to recommend one of our affiliates, AbeBooks, a collaborative of many fine individual booksellers, a number of whom specialize in rare and out of print books.  Please CLICK HERE to go to our Affiliates page for a link to AbeBooks.

Question:  I understand that it's cheaper to publish on CD-ROM than in  printed book form, but is that the only reason you publish on CDs?

Answer:  The largest reason is cost, but here are some others.  We can make a CD-ROM available to our customers as soon as we complete it, eliminating the wait for a printer to print, bind and ship. We can produce CD-ROMs in very small quantities, which lets us undertake re-publication projects that would not sell most printers' minimum press runs.  CD-ROMs also ensure that we are never out of stock.

CD-ROMs also let us add features that would be impossible in printed form, such as slide shows and the thumbnail images click on in order to see a greatly expanded image.  Thumbnails don't just apply to photos; topographic maps are really best viewed this way, and we include lots of them on our CD-ROMs.  A number of our customers who already own one or more of the rare local history books that we have republished on CD-ROM have purchased our CD-ROMs to accompany their rare and fragile original editions.  This lets them avoid damaging their rare books, provides easier access, and also offers the additional items we add to most of our CDs.

Librarians, archivists, and people who work at historical societies tell us how happy they are to have older books in CD-ROM form.  They tell us that they frequently must refuse to let their patrons make photocopies of pages from older books when the binding or paper begin to deteriorate,  but that it is easy for patrons to simply print a few pages from a book that is on a CD-ROM.  CD-ROMs also take up far less shelf space than the same material would in paper form.  It is also much easier to respond to e-mail queries by sending an image from a CD-ROM as attachments to their e-mail response than it is to photocopy the pages from a book.

Usability is another factor.  Once you get the hang of it, it's much easier to switch back and forth between an index and the text on a computer screen than it is in a book -- and no worry about losing your place if you take your finger out of the book to write something down.

Question:  That's all well and good, but I still want to buy a book, not a CD-ROM.  Do you have any suggestions?

Answer:  We understand!  For that reason (and because there are obviously many, many titles we do not have in our own catalog) we have carefully selected affiliates whom we ourselves use whom we are confident in recommending.  Please CLICK HERE to go to the affiliates section of our Search page to access our affiliates and shop with them. 

Do I have to be a computer expert to use your CD-ROMs?

Answer:  If you were able to find this page on the internet, you will be able to use our CD-ROMs. 

That's because all of our CDs are designed to function like websites.  You navigate around them by clicking, just like you do on the web.  Every page has a link back to the "table of contents" at the bottom, so even if you get a little bit lost, you can always find your way back to familiar territory.  We also provide frequent contextual links on individual pages.

Where to buy our CD-ROMs:

We're very pleased to announce that many of our titles related to New York State are available at the following fine bookstore:

• Hope Farm Press & Bookstore, 252 Main Street, Saugerties, NY 12477.  Their phone number is (845)246-3522.  Be sure to check their website as well.  It's at  http://www.hopefarmbooks.com.  

We don't have retail vendors for our titles about other states yet, so if you have a bookstore or other business and would like to handle them, we would be glad to hear from you.  We offer attractive terms for wholesale orders.

Questions about our subject matter:

Question:  How do you handle questionable or touchy material -- material having to do with racism, sex, violence, religious preferences, etc.?

Answer:  We handle it entirely in the context of the source material, which we do not expurgate or censor. 

You should realize that in America of the 19th and early 20th centuries racial/ethnic group membership and religious orientation were considered suitable topics for humor. so, if an ethnic joke was printed in a high school annual of the period (and some were!), we don't attempt to hide it. Nor would we disguise an unflattering ethnic name associated with a feature on a US topographic map of the period (and there were some pretty egregious ones by today's standards).   We don't publish pornography or erotica, even in an historical context (actually, mentions of sex in older materials are very rare and downright prudish compared with today's standards).  We choose not to publish political or social tracts whose purpose is to denigrate individuals or groups (even though many such documents existed in the time frame we cover). An important aspect of history is understanding how views on important issues have changed over the years.   Occasionally we comment editorially on material we publish, but our comments are intended to provoke thought and discussion. We invite your comments on material we publish, and often create free e-mail discussion groups where others may wish to respond to your thoughts. No purchase is required to participate in these e-mail discussion groups.

Answer:  The short answer is that it depends.

If you're not familiar with directories as they were published in the 19th and early 20th centuries, there is some information you'll find in most of them.  First, there's typically a little information about the city or county -- a lot in some cases, particularly if it's also called a gazetteer.  Often there's information about local institutions, such as schools, churches, clubs, and elected officials. 

Second, there's almost always a list of residents.  Sometimes this is a list of businesses (which typically include farmers), and sometimes it's a list of householders.  This section usually includes the street address, and often includes the occupation of the head of household and sometimes the employer.  For farmers, often the number of acres farmed in included. 

Finally, there are always advertisements.  These can be very informative about what life was like in that community when the directory was compiled.

Generally we don't index the directories we publish because the process is so labor-intensive. 

Questions about our products and services:

Question:  When I buy a CD-ROM from Between the Lakes Group, what do I get?

Answer:  The simplest answer to your question is this.  A CD-ROM containing the material described in our write-up on this website. 

Our CDs start automatically on most PCs, (Mac users, please click here for information specific to your computer) but we also include a flier with extra instructions for those who may be unfamiliar with data CD-ROMs -- and a whole "Support" section on this website for any remaining problems.  The labels on our CD-ROMs are in full color, occasionally depicting material actually found on that CD. After all, there's no reason why we can't make the CDs attractive as well as useful! 

We package our CDs in paper CD envelopes inside sturdy cardboard envelopes manufactured for that specific purpose.

Question:  How do you ship your CD-ROMs?

Answer:  We ship by First Class Mail (not "media mail" or parcel post) -- or by the international equivalent.  Occasionally -- most frequently in the case of larger orders -- we will upgrade shipping to Priority Mail at no additional charge.

Answer:  For several years we were able to reply "nothing at all" to that question.  Unfortunately increasing costs coupled with the January 8, 2006 postal rate increase made it impossible for us to continue that practice.  Accordingly, we began charging a flat $1.50 per order, regardless of the number of CD-ROMs in it.  No, that doesn't cover the cost of the packaging and the postage, but it does help.  The calculation is automatic if you purchase on-line.

By the way, we held the line on the shipping and handling charge even in the face of the major postal increase of May 2007.  It's still just $1.50 per order, no matter how many CD-ROMs you purchase.

Question:  I'm not located in the United States.  Can I still purchase from you?

Answer:  We're delighted to serve international customers!  However, we do require payment in US dollars.  The easiest way to accomplish this is to order via PayPal.  For many currencies they will automatically convert the payment to USD. 

We cannot accept checks or drafts drawn in other currencies or drawn on accounts in foreign banks, however.  The costs of collecting these items exceeds the price of the CDs.  If you are overseas and cannot purchase using PayPal, please obtain an official check or international money order denominated in US dollars from your local bank and enclose it with your order.

We do not impose any extra charges for international shipping. 

Question:  How frequently do you ship?

Answer:  With an occasional day off due to weather, brief absences from the office, etc., we go to the Post Office every day except Sunday.  When you pay by credit card or via PayPal, we ship immediately -- the same day we receive your order if we can get to the Post Office in time. 

When you pay by check we do reserve the right to wait a few days for your check to clear before shipping.  However, clearing times have gotten much shorter in recent years; never more than three business days  We do NOT engage in the abusive multi-week hold process that some vendors unfortunately apply to check payments.

Once you are known to us, your check payment will usually not delay shipment at all (unless a check you have sent us previously has been returned to us unpaid -- then, we will hold your subsequent checks a bit longer).

Answer:  By all means contact us -- an e-mail to geoff at betweenthelakes.com  (substitute an "@" sign for the "at" in the address) is the best way to do it -- and tell us. 

There are a few possibilities to consider.  First, it's possible we didn't receive your order -- but we won't know that has happened unless you tell us.  Second, it's possible that we've messed up someplace in the process of filling your order -- but, again, we won't know that unless you tell us.  Third, it's possible that there has been a problem with the Post Office. 

We will do everything we can to make sure you receive the CD-ROMs you order from us.  Please let us know if you don't receive an order in a timely manner. 

Question:  How do you make sure that the CD-ROM you send me will work? 

Answer:  We are fanatical about our quality control process.  First of all, we produce all of our own CDs, starting with high quality blank CD-R stock (not the discount CD-R stock some vendors obtain at fire sale prices and then foist on their customers).  We never outsource or contract out any portion of the process.  We also spot-test CD-ROMs we ship by loading them in a real CD drive or DVD drive on a real PC just before we pack them.  We rotate our testing among several PCs to make sure we are not producing CDs that work only in some units. 

Question:  Will my CD-ROM work in a Mac?

Answer:  The answer to this one is pretty much always but still, "it depends".  CLICK HERE to see our special page on Mac support.

If you are running Unix or Linux as operating systems, the most likely limitations are (1) Microsoft PowerPoint slideshows on a few of our CD-ROMs, and (2) our use of the Joliet standard for image names.  Our experience is that people who are technologically well versed enough to be using Linux or Unix can get around these problems easily.

Most of our CDs have files in PDF format (which stands for Portable Document Format -- pioneered by the Adobe Corporation), which is intended to be usable on any computer, whether Mac, PC, or other. 

Answer:  That's a fair question!  We have used Macs in the past, and find them absolutely great. 

However, we base our CDs on Microsoft Windows technology as a matter of economics.  We're a very small business.  Only 2% to 3% of visitors to our website use Macs -- the remainder use one of the Microsoft operating systems.  To be fully Mac-compatible, we would need to run at least two -- and probably three or more -- Mac OS versions.  This means we would need two (or likely more) additional computers in our small office.  As well as the additional hardware and software cost -- and the physical space, we would have to nearly double the time we put into testing. Considering the small volume of any CD that we can expect to sell to Mac users, this would greatly increase our costs, and our price to you.

With newer Macs increasingly able to read CD-ROMS prepared for PCs, we can't justify the expense based on our present business volume. 

Answer:  We maintain a small consulting practice, helping others both with our main business, recovering history and genealogy, as well as in other areas in which we have accumulated expertise.   Learn more about our consulting practice.

Questions about the way we do business:

Answer:  Contact us immediately. We will try our best to help you.  As the old saying goes:  "If you like our products, tell your friends.  If you don't like them, tell us." 

We will do our best to make you a satisfied customer, and happy with the product you have ordered. If a refund or replacement is in order, you can be assured that one will be forthcoming, and promptly.   Go to our contact page to e-mail us or call (860)824-5912 about any problems you encounter. 

If you are satisfied but have suggestions for improving our products, we would like to know about that, too. We value your input!

Answer:   Indexing takes time -- lots of it.  While indexing greatly reduces the number of CD-ROMs we can create and greatly increases our costs, we know that a good index adds immense value, and we know that people appreciate having complete, accurate indexes.  We certainly appreciate a complete, accurate index in material we buy (at least when we can find them!)

When we do index one of our publications, we usually put the indexes on-line because it makes good sense in an Internet age -- they help people find us via search engines like Google and Yahoo!, and we can help people find unexpected connections on our own site via our own internal search capability provided by WebSideStory (formerly Atomz).   

But there's more! In doing our own family histories, too many times we spent sizeable sums of money for books that seemed very likely to have information about our families in them.  Too often, when the book arrived, it did not contain the information we needed. This may have happened to you as well.

To put it bluntly, we felt ripped off.  We decided that we did NOT want our customers to feel that way, or to feel that we had exaggerated what our CD-ROMs contained. Putting some indexes on our website seemed to be the most sensible way to make clear exactly what purchasers would find on our CD-ROMs.  

Why don't other re-publishers of old records and historical material put indexes on line?  After reading why we do prepare indexes of some of the material we republish and put them on line, you probably already have a good sense of the reasons that others are unwilling to provide them.  When you purchase a CD from us, you are encouraging us to provide indexes (or at least a list of the names in the index) on line.   

Answer:  Yes, we ARE different!

Possibly it will help if you understand how a few of our competitors work.  First, they rip apart the old books (a few save the cover so they can have the pages glued back into them and later re-sell the book as being in the original binding).  Then, they feed the pages through an automatic high speed bulk scanner that feeds data directly into a program that directly creates a PDF file.  Then, virtually untouched by human hands (or eyes) they burn the results onto a CD and push the product out the door.  Why?  They care about making money, not about history or genealogy, not about old books, and certainly not about doing a good job.

Our process goes like this:  We hand-scan our books and ephemera, page by page, and work hard to preserve the original book in the process.  We scan at high resolutions, usually either 300 dpi or 600 dpi, so that we lose no detail either in the printed word or in pictures.  Our competitors actually brag about how many pages they can shove through their high-speed scanners per minute, while we think in terms of how many minutes it can take to get a good scan of a single particularly difficult page.  After scanning, we individually adjust the images of every page for the clearest possible result.  We check the pagination to make sure that all the pages are there and correctly numbered.  After the files that make up our CD-ROMs are complete and tested, we have a "beta test" process in which a second person (and sometimes a third person as well) reviews every single page for completeness, accuracy, clarity, and overall image quality. 

And our old books, the ones we scanned?  We put them back in our library -- unlike most of our competitors, who put their old books in a landfill. 

Answer:  We use Adobe Acrobat too.  We like it, and have been using various versions of it for more than 15 years!  And we also ship a free copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader on every one of our CDs, just in case you don't already have a copy.  But we still hand-index many of our publications, and here's why.

Adobe bases their lookups on a form of optical character recognition technology -- OCR.  Using crisp, clear originals, set in the popular modern typefaces, on bone white paper, they can routinely achieve better than 95% accuracy on most of their lookups and can achieve nearly 100% in some cases.  That is pretty impressive, and definitely a vast improvement over the early days of OCR!  

But let's look at the realities of republishing local history and genealogy.  

• First, the typefaces that were in use a century ago are NOT the ones Adobe's OCR engine is calibrated to read.  That means that virtually all old local history books and other similar publications we scan are automatically going to achieve far worse than 95% accuracy.  The characters that the OCR engine will correctly identify in those old fonts are those that are identical to the same letter in a modern type font.  There is a whole industry of typeface designers whose continued employment is based on coming up with new typefaces -- and this has been the case ever since moveable type was invented in the 1400s.  Many typefaces that are a century old or older  might as well be written in Greek as far as modern OCR engines are concerned.
• The quality of the original has a great deal to do with the success of an OCR reader.  The success rates mentioned above apply to mint condition originals, on bone white paper, with un-faded print, made with typefaces that have been generated electronically (not the same old hand-set metal type that had already been in use for several years setting a weekly newspaper -- and collecting plenty of dings and wear in the process).  We always look for the best quality originals we can find, of course.  But no amount of looking is ever going to make well-used, hand-set type, in an obsolete typeface, on paper a century or more old into perfect quality originals.
• Any kind of lookup technology makes the assumption that you know EXACTLY what you are looking for.  But computers are very exact.  Here are some examples of lookups that a computer will NOT consider a match:
  • "Post master" is NOT the same thing as "Postmaster"
  • "N. Y." is NOT the same thing as "NY"
  • "and" is NOT the same thing as "&"
  • "Bonell" is NOT the same thing as "Bonnell" or "Bunnell" or "Bonnel"
  • "VanBenschoten" is NOT the same thing as "Van Benschoten" -- or even "Vanbenschoten"
  • "Rob't" is NOT the same thing as "Robert"

  The spelling people used 100 years ago -- and the way they abbreviated and punctuated -- was highly variable, frequently even within the same source.  And no, the Adobe lookup engine does NOT do a soundex lookup!

• We are providing you with scanned images of the old books -- essentially, photographs.  Even Adobe doesn't claim that they can reliably index material in photographs!

So, by all means use the Adobe finding capability on our CD-ROMs too!  At very least it will correctly locate the name or words you are looking for in our index -- the indexes that are unique to our CD-ROMs. Then, you can easily go from our index to the page where the name or term appears. 

Finally, whether you are doing genealogy or whether you are writing local history, you are probably not going to be satisfied with an 80% accuracy rate -- or even 90% -- much less 60% -- which is what you can expect to achieve on a good day with modern OCR technology and century-old documents.

Are you content to be half right?  To us, that means that you are willing to be half wrong, and there's no way that we can condone that!

We do recognize that manual indexing can include errors.  We check our indexes carefully, and we consider a 99% accuracy rate acceptable for one we create ourselves, and will reprint an original author's index if we find it is 90% accurate or better when we spot-check it.  

OCR is rapidly advancing.  We already have an OCR program called Abbyy Finereader that does a better job with old fonts than Adobe does, and we occasionally use it for projects that are mainly straight text, with good quality type.  Eventually, perhaps some successor to it will do the whole job. But it's not quite there yet, and our competitors are kidding you when they say it is. 

Answer:  We think that this is great news!  We don't think it will hurt our business one bit, and we think it may actually help it.  We've even joined forces with Google to include some of our titles in their Google Books section.  We also have affiliate relationships with Amazon, Genealogical Publishing, and AbeBooks.com, all of which who provide at least a peek into many of their titles. 

There's no question that getting the big players involved will help reach the point where the internet actually lives up to its promise, and we think that's super news.

Here's why we don't think it will hurt our business.  Because we tend to republish fairly obscure local history, we think that it will be decades before they get around to providing the kind of material on line that we furnish on CDs.  Also, we often add previously unpublished historical material to our CDs.  Under present copyright laws, you will not find this new material elsewhere during our lifetimes. 

An additional benefit we are definitely going to see in the reasonably short run -- perhaps a year or so -- is development of software that can "read" the old type fonts accurately.  This will have to happen in order for the Googles of the world to actually provide reliable lookups in the old texts.  If Between the Lakes Group asks Adobe Corporation to improve their ability to read old fonts, they aren't going to pay much attention.  If Google and Amazon ask, we will rapidly see massive improvements in this area.  Soon, these improvements will be affordable, and we'll incorporate them in our operation.  We'll be able to republish more local history faster, and also keep prices under control.

And, such services as Google Books and our affiliates can provide our prospective customers with a look at a portion of the product BEFORE they buy. 

Question:  What about privacy?

Answer:  Between the Lakes Group has a privacy policy that we believe not only is fair, but that goes beyond fair.  Please compare it with the privacy policies of others who offer historical and genealogical material on the web -- if you can find their privacy policies.  Let us know if you find that we fall short in any respect.  Here are some of the key elements of our privacy policy:

• We don't sell, rent, loan to or otherwise share your name, e-mail address, or postal address with any other organization or individual, ever.  
• What you buy from us is a matter between you and us.  We would reveal it only under legal process.  
• If you ask us not to send you e-mail (or postal mail), we will not send you e-mail unless you send us an e-mail (or contact us otherwise) specifically requesting an answer from us.  We maintain a "NO E-MAIL" file that we actively compare with all outbound promotional e-mail we send (and we send VERY little of that!).  We dislike "spam" e-mail as much as you do, and we make every effort not to fall into the spammer category in anyone's mind.  We make every effort to comply 100%+ with the Federal law against spam.  Even before the law was passed, our own voluntary e-mail practices were already considerably stricter than the provisions Congress enacted into law.
• We ABSOLUTELY NEVER telemarket.  We hate telemarketers every bit as much as you do!

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This website was last updated 07/22/2008