When I saw digitalized books were being offered through Trains unlimited I was excited to sign up. It was the biggest draw for me. On the members page Im only seeing 5 books though. Am I not looking in the right places? Ive seen others complain about how user unfriendly things are with the changes going on with the archives and MRVP videos, so I know im not the only one who has issues finding what they need to to find. Due to this, I was wondering if maybe im just overlooking the collection of books if there are more being offered. If only 5 books are being offered, with the majority being of no use to me, I dont see myself keeping Unlimited, but I dont want to cancel before my trial in case im overlooking other books, or if a lot more will be added soon.
That's all I'm seeing of the free variety.
Scuba_2011 When I saw digitalized books were being offered through Trains unlimited I was excited to sign up. It was the biggest draw for me. On the members page Im only seeing 5 books though. Am I not looking in the right places? Ive seen others complain about how user unfriendly things are with the changes going on with the archives and MRVP videos, so I know im not the only one who has issues finding what they need to to find. Due to this, I was wondering if maybe im just overlooking the collection of books if there are more being offered. If only 5 books are being offered, with the majority being of no use to me, I dont see myself keeping Unlimited, but I dont want to cancel before my trial in case im overlooking other books, or if a lot more will be added soon.
I found this:
https://www.trains.com/beginners/faqs/
which may have answers to your questions. I do see some mention of "free books" for you, but all that means is you get two (books being plural).
Considering the length of this FAQ article, it really should have an answer to your question.
Ed
7j43kConsidering the length of this FAQ article, it really should have an answer to your question.
What I'd hope and expect is that over the next few months Kalmbach will work the bugs out of their book scanning (or partner with someone like Google or Hathitrust to get access to effective digitization or already-scanned material) and make many (ideally, all) their out-of-print publications available on the trains.com service. That would blacken the eye of all the evil 'rare book' purveyors who ratchet up the price of access to older specialty railroad publications, while allowing the monetization to flow to the 'original provider' of the content, something difficult before the advent of a service like 'unlimited'.
We have had relatively recent threads on a few MR publications including works on wiring model railroads -- having those as free-to-read (and perhaps free-to-print for page reference under the layout with a flashlight!) would be very low-cost and even lower-marginal-cost for Kalmbach, especially considering the costs that would be required even for limited reprint of bound books with known serious demand.
Of course, that model might be extended to other out-of-print enthusiast books, with a back-end royalty to whoever holds the creative rights or physical copyright to the original material. I can think offhand of a great many books published in the '80s that are difficult to use as reference material because of ridiculously high 'scarce resource' pricing -- having access to read them in a 'protected environment' would be a tremendous advantage to many railroad (or modeling) enthusiasts and the actual 'fair' payment-per-view is 'new' and otherwise unrecoverable gain for the original content providers or asset owners with little administrative or transfer costs...
With the number of historical computer related issues I have to assume either internal IT incompetence or a revolving door in the IT department.