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Against the Grain

Volume 21 | Issue 5 Article 5

November 2009 Are Any Still Out-of-print John Riley Against the Grain, [email protected]

Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/atg Part of the and Information Science Commons

Recommended Citation Riley, John (2009) "Are Any Book Still Out-of-print," Against the Grain: Vol. 21: Iss. 5, Article 5. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.2641

This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University . Please contact [email protected] for additional information. c/o Katina Strauch 209 Richardson Avenue MSC 98, The Citadel Charleston, SC 29409 charleston conference issue TM

21, number 5 NOVEMBER 2009

ISSN: 1043-2094 “Linking Publishers, Vendors and Librarians” Are Any Still Out-of-Print? by John Riley (Editor, Library Marketplace, Against the Grain; Co-owner Gabriel Books; Chair, ALCTS Out of Print Discussion Group)

nce upon a time the term “out-of-print” it more profitable to dispose of inventory by actually meant something. Back in the remaindering or pulping than to warehouse it. Odays of setting up gargantuan presses That is when previously stored inventory began with sixteen page jigsaw metal plates, making flooding the remainder tables in book shops and films, mixing inks, running color proofs and smaller print runs became necessary for pub- number of on-demand titles topped then folding and cutting the signatures the lishers to survive. Since the late 1970’s many those of traditional books for the first process of a book entailed minimum other factors have influenced the decision to time. The jump in on-demand output in print runs in the thousands to be economical. print shorter runs. Books now endure a shorter 2008 followed an even bigger increase One of these massive platen or Web presses lifespan in the marketplace because there are in 2007 when production skyrocketed could crank out two thousand copies of a five thousands of more titles printed every year. 462%. Since 2002, production of on-de- hundred page book in under an hour. When Once flush book budgets and pocketbooks have mand titles has soared 774% compared a book had sold out its print run it was con- grown tighter as well. As Calvin Trillin so to a 126% increase in traditional titles.” sidered “out-of-print,” because going back to pungently observed, “Books now have a shelf Publishers Weekly, 5/19/2009. press meant remounting those stored plates life somewhere between milk and yogurt.” As technology improves digital printing and doing another couple of thousand copies. The printing revolution is now over. POD Books which had gone out-of-print became may even take over the remaining print runs (print-on-demand) and DOD (digitization-on- produced by traditional printing. Digital print- the domain of specialist book dealers and were demand) have gone main stream. Academic even considered rare books with an increasing ing simply means printing that is computer and scholarly publishers, self publishers, and generated, stored digitally, and produced di- value as they became more scarce. reprint publishers have all discovered the Later, with the Supreme Court’s 1979 rul- value of short run digital printing. To cite continued on page 14 ing in Thor Power Tool Company v. Commis- production figures from Bowker’s Books in sioner of Internal Revenue, which prohibited Print database: companies including publishers from continu- “The number of new and revised titles What To Look For In This Issue: ally writing down the value of unsold stock, produced by traditional production Open Access and the Future of out-of-print came to describe more and more methods fell 3% in 2008, to 275,232, Scholarly Communication...... 78 recent books many going out-of-print within a but the number of on-demand and short 2008 Charleston Conference Reports....82 year or two of publication. Publishers found run titles soared 132%, to 285,394. The The and the ...... 90 All Aboard the Twitter Train...... 98 If Rumors Were Horses Everything as We Know it will Change...... 101 elcome to the Charleston Conference of Paratext! She has most recently served Interviews issue of ATG! We are extremely as Executive Director of the Reference Wheartened and gratified that our Information Group at CQ Press, a division Ann Okerson...... 44 attendance for this, the 29th Charleston of SAGE, responsible for the academic and Dona S. Straley...... 48 Conference is excellent given the economic business reference and CQ David R. Lide...... 50 climate and the fact that many, many of you Researcher divisions. She comes to Paratext have written to say that you cannot come this with twenty years of experience in sales, Profiles Encouraged year but will be sure to come next year! As marketing, and global business development, John Riley...... 8 of right now, two and a half weeks before the with particular expertise in digital product and Narda Tafuri...... 30 Conference begins, we have 941 attendees business models. In her new position, Ms. Mitchell Davis...... 36 just 134 fewer than the same time last year! Vance will continue to serve on the Board Like wow! of Directors of the Society for Scholarly David Taylor...... 40 Just learned that Alix Vance has been appointed President of the scholarly journal, Learned Publishing. She is a graduate o f We l l e s l e y College (A.B) and continued on page 6 1043-2094(200911)21:5;1-S on Sony and Amazon on Kindle. Out-of-print scholarly, scientific and technical books that Are Any Books Still Out-of-Print? books are a very inexpensive way to acquire had been relegated to the dusty corners of used from page 1 content that fosters links to sell more advertis- bookshops all of sudden became valuable when ing or to attract readers to more current eBook exposed to a worldwide market. rectly from electronic data without the need offerings, as when Walt Whitman’s Leaves The op or better termed “aftermarket” for for printing plates. We all do digital printing of Grass links you to lawn care and sod deal- books will continue to grow as libraries ex- when we use our word processors and inkjet ers. But the quality and authenticity of many pand their weeding projects, more used books printers. Digital printing is helping to make scanned books are dubious for us readers. As stores go online only, and everyone turns into the term “out-of-print” obsolete as publishers one Google engineer explained “We’re not a part time dealer. Many people can now store digital copies of books for short scanning all those books to be read by people. still prefer the original to a reprint so print runs at any time. It has even become We’re scanning them to be read by our AI.” the POD market for reprints will continue to economically viable to print just one copy Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch: Rewiring be challenged by the growing aftermarket. of some books. Publishers have found that the World from Edison to Google 223 (2008) What POD can accomplish however is to working with companies such as Lightning (quoted from http://www.openbookalliance. bring more truly rare and scarce books to the Source and Book Surge they can even store, org/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Google- market and thus to a wider public. As they print and fulfill orders directly from the short Book-Settlement-Fact-and-Fiction.pdf). do we can expect to see the prices for many run printer’s factory. The end product is indis- Geoffrey Nunberg calls the rare books to decrease. tinguishable from the original and the only way Project: “A Metadata Trainwreck,” citing a vendor or library will know that it is POD is Reprints have always been a part of aca- wrong publication dates, erroneous categori- demic libraries. During the heyday of univer- that it was shipped from the printer. zation, etc. For example “A book on Peter And now with Large-Scale Digitization sity expansion in the 1950’s and 1960’s reprint F. Drucker is dated 1905, four years before companies stepped in to fill the many new Initiatives (LSDI) whole libraries are being the management consultant was even born; a digitized and their contents put up on the Web. libraries that were created. Companies such as book of Virginia Woolf’s letters is dated 1900, Scolar, Hacker, Haskell House, University LSDI by Open Content Alliance (OCA), when she would have been eight years old. Boston Library Consortium, Google, Hathi Books, and Barnes and Noble stepped up to Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities is dated fill the gaps. My personal favorite amongst Trust, Universal Library, Project Guten- 1888…. H.L. Mencken’s The American Lan- berg and others are making millions of public the reprint companies is Dover founded in guage is classified as Family & Relationships. 1941 by Blanche and Haywood Cirker. domain titles that were once considered op A French edition of Hamlet and a Japanese available online for free. (www.publicdomain- Many of their seven thousand titles remain in edition of Madame Bovary are both classified print today. They invented the modern trade reprints.org) also (re: LSDI http://www.clir. as Antiques and Collectibles.” (Chronicle of org/pubs/reports/pub141/sec1.html) and in the process proved that Higher Education, August 31, 2009) obscure titles could sell if produced well and The Boston Public Library in conjunction And as Robert Darnton has noted, “Google priced affordably. One other lesson they can with the Open Content Alliance is taking it employs hundreds, perhaps thousands, of engi- teach POD companies is to always include an one step further with their Digitize on Demand neers but, as far as I know, not a single bibliog- updated introduction or even a . A colo- service. From their site: “Simply search for a rapher. Its innocence of any visible concern for phon would also be nice in these new reprints public domain book on and, if is particularly regrettable in that indicating print date and location, type of paper, it’s at the Boston Public Library and hasn’t most texts, as I have just argued, were unstable and any other historical data available. Reprint been scanned yet, you will see a “Scan This throughout most of the . No companies can do better justice to books and Book” button. When you click the button single copy of an eighteenth-century best-seller bibliography than simply printing a raw copy and follow the steps to confirm, we’ll have a will do justice to the endless variety of editions. and putting it in a generic binding, usually librarian go and get the book from the stacks, Serious scholars will have to study and com- paper, that has as much warmth as a Cliff’s bring it to our scanning center, and have our pare many editions, in the original versions, Notes pamphlet. They can also collate their team of scanners digitize it page-by-page. The not in the digitized reproductions that Google books before scanning so we don’t run into this books are being highlighted in GnuBook, the will sort out according to criteria that probably type of scary caveat from Kessinger, a reprint Internet Archive’s exciting new bookreader, will have nothing to do with bibliographical company: “This title…may have occasional and are also available in other formats, such as scholarship.” (The Library in the New Age, imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, PDF and full text. BPL also creates a Webpage New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Num- missing text, poor pictures, markings, dark of bibliographic information for each scanned ber 10, June 12, 2008, http://www.nybooks. backgrounds…” book. (see http://openlibrary.org/bpl) com/contents/20080612.) Perhaps we are on the cusp of every It is estimated that one hundred million The last decade has also seen the rebirth bibliomaniac’s dream: a universal library of all separate titles have been printed since Guten- of out-of-print books from online book mer- the important books from all times and places berg. At the rate that books are getting scanned chants such as Advanced Book Exchange, easily accessible to all with further capacity we can expect to see the majority of important Alibris, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and for quick and high quality reprints. There is a out-of-print books available online or as POD many others. These companies maintain threat, however, that this utopia might actually within a few years. In its infancy the Internet databases of well over one hundred million turn into a dystopia as we risk trading all of was blind to nearly 99% of the world’s informa- used and op books. Where librarians once our bookstores and libraries for a database of tion because books were left out. Now with had to send off wants and desiderata lists to confused editions and “missing text.” 99% of information born digital the tables have Jake Chernofsky’s Antiquarian Bookman turned. Books will be born as with a (AB) then wait weeks for return postcards Our contributors have attempted to answer POD option. quoting prices and condition they can now get the question “Is anything still out-of-print?” I The one challenger to POD that has arisen that same information instantly on the Web. don’t think they have come up with a definitive in the last few years is the hand held electronic The Internet has radically changed booksell- answer, but I think all of them point us in the book reader. Since it bypasses printing alto- ing as well. Many books have lost value as it direction of an answer. gether publishers may embrace it to the detri- became apparent that there were many more (Be sure to attend the Charleston Confer- ment of print. No more “smearing dinosaur copies available than was previously thought. ence Lively Lunch on November 5 from 12:30- blood on dead trees” as the old saying about This happened to modern first editions whose 1:45 “Will POD Spell DOA for OP?” on the printing goes, even though dinosaur blood scarcity was belied by the hundreds of copies same topic where the will be expanding will still be needed to generate the electrons that appeared for sale on the Web soon after on their papers. Also keep open time at ALA in eBooks. Still, hand held devices will only publication. Even the once very marketable Midwinter for the Out-of-Print Discussion enhance the demand for op books. Google and signed first edition is now very common for Group where the topic will be Digitization on Amazon are racing each other to offer more current authors. Some titles increased in Demand in Libraries.) For more information and more public domain books for free, Google value because of the Internet. Once obscure contact . 14 Against the Grain / November 2009