Books should never go out of print
Here’s a statistic for you:
“From 98 to 99 percent of all books ever published are now out-of-print, so they don’t show up in traditional bestseller lists.”
That comes from Anirvan Chatterjee, founder of BookFinder.com founder. I pulled that from a post on The Book Standard if you want more information.
But I don’t. I’m a little disgusted. Forget the part about the best-seller lists. Why are any books ever out of print? The hard and fast reality is that, with current technology, digital copies of many (if not most) out of print books exist. And all of those digital copies could be very easily converted into the format necessary for one-off printing. And at a reasonable — if not downright cheap — cost.
There’s no excuse for it. Not one I’ll buy, at least.
September 14th, 2007 at 8:16 am
Actually you making a couple of wrong assumptions there…
The first is that digital versions of all books exist. They don’t. In fact, it is the opposite, most books do not exist in digital form. Unless there is some type of re-release or resolicit for a book, publishers will often print off the original plates. Many of the publishers who produce classics still use the original plates from when the book was originally printed. So for example, if you had someone who wrote a novel anytime pre-1995 that didn’t sell all that well, chances are it only exists as a print copy and no digital version exists. The only time publishers update a book into digital form is when they are changing something — new text or introduction, new cover, etc.
It is also not as cheap and easy to digitize a previously published book as one might think. They have to be re-typeset in order to accomplish this, which is why publishers only do it if they’re re-releasing a book. Also, even when re-typeset, they have to be re-copyedited to make sure there were no errors. Even for a small independent publisher with a limtied-amount of titles, that’s a time consuming affair that is hard to justify.
Even the library of congress does not have digitized versions of every book. Chances are they just have the originally submitted hard copy.
Also, print-on-demand while great for giving life back to books that won’t sell thousands of copies, is still relatively expensive compared to regular printing (and again hard to justify when even a small publisher can only expect very minimal sales). Small authors like myself can explore the Lulu option, but we do so knowing it means no money up front and we probably won’t see a return, we just want to get our books out there. Someone running a publishing house doesn’t have the liberty of that option.
This is why Google Books did not take off on the scale they expected. Google jumped hip deep into the fray and suddenly realized that the only way to get a substantial library of digitized books was to go to the publishers (who then responded by trying to sue Google).
Finally, there’s the copyright issues. Many times, the rights revert to the author or estate who have their own reasons to hold off printing or reprinting with new material. Add to it contractual red tape where certain agents get a percentage, etc. etc. etc.
Needless to say, it sucks and not much can be done.
September 14th, 2007 at 8:40 am
Ken,
I reject your arguments out of hand.
1) Somewhere in the process, every single book produced in the last 20 years (or more, probably) was made into some ‘digital’ form. I’ve not seen any mimeographed books with the authors original long-hand manuscript. While it may not be the perfect form ready to be distributed, converting from one digital format to another can be solved by the suitable application of smart development. And yes, the publishers (or perhaps the original) authors may need to be tapped to do this. Difficult? Sure. Will be met with resistance? Absolutely. But change always is.
2) Maybe publishers shouldn’t try to make a killing on one-off old books? I’m not saying they should abandon profit models. I’m suggesting that a significant value in their overall sales — primarily from new releases — can be seen by using older titles as spring boards into new titles. Alternately, they could *all* be made as eBooks, leaving it to the reader to pay for printing or not.
3) I don’t want to downplay the issues of copyright, but these can be addressed. Easy? Never said that. No technology can fix this — but a good business plan can.
September 14th, 2007 at 9:27 am
Now this is getting fun…
1. Here again you’re making an assumption. The desktop publishing revolution was in full swing in 87, but in many cases the authors were still sending in typed manuscripts. In fact, many older authors still send in typed manuscripts, not necessarily due to resistance to change, but out of tradition, the love and feel of the old keys pounding. Also, keep in mind that many of the old software used in those early days are not compatible with today’s software. Anyone who has tried to work with an old pagemaker file knows this to be true. One other point of mention, even though printers were using computers as far back as the seventies, the plates used for most books cannot be kept forever. So a book that goes out of print and was hand typeset, literally does disappear. Now anything post 87 (even post 80) has a good chance of staying in print. Many titles are actually done print on demand rather than kept in stock). For books going forward, this won’t be the case, but everything pre-80, if its out of print, the only way to bring it back is to rescan and retypset. Anything prior to the late seventies was still laid out by hand. As you said difficult, will be met with resistance, but there is no reason for this to change. Publishers are not archives but businesses. They have no obligation to keep everything in print. That would be a wonderful fantasy, but its just not a reality. And it isn’t the future. Even in the age of MP3s, iTunes, and iPods, we still don’t have access to every single music file ever created. At best, we’ll have a small set of publishers like NYRB Books who do a great job of mining for books that shouldn’t be lost, but are still limited in what they can release, and then you’ll have books that still sell and viewed as worthy of being in print.
2) Well depends on the publisher you’re talking about — someone running a small house in Portland needs to make every dime count. Creating e-books and reprints cost time and money. For big publishers, even they can cry time and expense. As for publishers trying to make a killing… they don’t. Unless its a huge author (i.e. Hemingway, Ludlum, Fitzgerald, Steel, etc). Book publishing is exactly like music or movies, you release a ton of material in hopes that you get one blockbuster that supports the entire operation. The simple fact is that the Danielle Steel’s of the world pay the bills for young angry writers like me to try and get a break. As for older titles being a springboard into newer titles, only in the case of a substantial author’s backlist as a tie to the same author’s new book (which is why so many publishers re-release a top-selling book by an author at the same time a new book comes out). Otherwise, it’s a wash. It is a fallacy that the general reading populace is just looking for new and different titles. People actually tend to stick to their hardline genres and favorite authors. As for e-books, I chuckle. Americans don’t use them. In fact, only countries in Asia have really jumped on e-books.
3) Watch an agent yell and scream about perpetual printing rights written into a bad contract signed by an author many years ago and you realize that this is not a simple issue. How long did it take the Beatles to get on iTunes?
September 14th, 2007 at 9:39 am
And let me state categorically… I agree with you.. books shouldn’t go out of print. Reality dictates otherwise.
September 14th, 2007 at 3:31 pm
Reality has a funny way of changing pretty quickly. I don’t disagree with you on any one point, but nothing changes the fact that — technologically speaking — books don’t have to remain unavailable. Welcome to the post-scarcity world.
September 14th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
Interesting post, Evo. This brings up the question of how do we digitize books that are out of print. I would absolutely LOVE to narrate a book that no one has read in years. How do you get the rights and the permissions to do such a thing?
September 15th, 2007 at 6:04 am
Actually in the case of really old books (i.e. classics), the rights have reverted to public domain. That’s why you have so many classic imprints releasing the same books. Anyone could digitize or podcast them. Some of the more popular podcasts on iTunes are people reading classic novels.
As for newer (20th century to present) titles that have gone out of print, first place to start is usually with the original publisher. If the rights haven’t reverted to the writer, chances are they control the publishing rights. Although, many have even entered public domain.
I always point to NYRB Classics as a great example of a publisher who does an amazing job of discovering books of merit that went out of print and re-released them in new editions.
http://www.nybooks.com/nyrb/
October 10th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
In 1965 aero publishers bought and published my “shot history of aviation.”
I am thinking of revising or rewriting it.
I can’t find any address for Aero, and suppose they are long ago out of business (I see some adds for books they published as late as 1975.
Can you tell me:
a) how can I find out who, if anybody, has the rights to the book?
b)how to find out who has the plates for the book?
Thanks,
Keith Woodmansee
October 10th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
Hi Keith,
Well, if you wrote the book, you should have the copyright. If you assigned the copyright to Aero and they are now out of business, I would assume (though I am not a lawyer) that the rights would have reverted back to the original copyright holder, which should be you.
You can do a copyright search here: http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ23.html#location
And as far as seeing if the plates are still around — good luck. It’s very possible you’ll need to retype it from a copy you have. The good news is that you don’t need plates any more. Get a digital version and save it.
November 27th, 2007 at 9:02 am
I’m still confused as to the first assumptions made; I see none.