Question on re-publishing Public Domain books.
January 29, 2011 10:50 AM Subscribe
What's stopping me laying out the text of these top PD books using a new PD font, designing my own covers and (occasionally) internal illustrations, and re-selling them via places like lulu.com?
Just seems a good way to practice my design / layout skills and maybe turn a profit.
Thoughts?
Nothing is stopping you (there are reprint publishers who specialize in doing this), but it's unlikely that you're going to make a lot of money at it unless your end product is a full-on art book whose beauty will make people want to buy it just as a lovely object. If it's not, the main market who'd buy such a reprint are very cost-sensitive buyers, mostly just looking for the cheapest possible copy. Other readers who'd care enough about the beauty of your editions to spend more probably also care too much about the editorial soundness of the text to be using Gutenberg editions.
posted by RogerB at 11:00 AM on January 29, 2011
posted by RogerB at 11:00 AM on January 29, 2011
Disney built a media empire based on that business model.
posted by jdwhite at 11:09 AM on January 29, 2011
posted by jdwhite at 11:09 AM on January 29, 2011
I'm not so sure about that, RogerB. If nicely designed - and more READABLE - versions were available in ePub format, I would certainly pay a couple of dollars US for iOS device reading. Reading some of those Gutenberrg texts on an iPad is not a pleasant experIence.
posted by OneMonkeysUncle at 11:44 AM on January 29, 2011
posted by OneMonkeysUncle at 11:44 AM on January 29, 2011
I had the exact same idea a while back but am insanely busy on other projects - please go for it!
Oh and post in Projects when it's underway?
posted by ceri richard at 11:46 AM on January 29, 2011
Oh and post in Projects when it's underway?
posted by ceri richard at 11:46 AM on January 29, 2011
Yeah, nothing.
Back in the day I played around with book-binding and made a few dozen blank notebooks with solid wood covers (birdseye maple, spalted maple, walnut burl, whatever else was in the offcut pile at the lumber yard). Then around Christmastime my wife hinted that she'd like a copy of James Joyce's Pomes Penyeach, which collection was long out of print. I found the collection online and layed them out into a couple of signatures using Quark, printed it off at the corner printshop and stitched them into a book.
A decade later, I'm still living in the afterglow.
So maybe that's another value-add you might consider adding to your PD books. Bookbinding is relatively straightforward and you don't need many tools or space to carry it off.
These two books are pretty much all you need to get going.
posted by notyou at 11:59 AM on January 29, 2011 [6 favorites]
Back in the day I played around with book-binding and made a few dozen blank notebooks with solid wood covers (birdseye maple, spalted maple, walnut burl, whatever else was in the offcut pile at the lumber yard). Then around Christmastime my wife hinted that she'd like a copy of James Joyce's Pomes Penyeach, which collection was long out of print. I found the collection online and layed them out into a couple of signatures using Quark, printed it off at the corner printshop and stitched them into a book.
A decade later, I'm still living in the afterglow.
So maybe that's another value-add you might consider adding to your PD books. Bookbinding is relatively straightforward and you don't need many tools or space to carry it off.
These two books are pretty much all you need to get going.
posted by notyou at 11:59 AM on January 29, 2011 [6 favorites]
See also these.
If Penguin can do it, so can you.
I agree with RogerB that you don't stand to make very much money on this, though. Most people aren't looking for something like this, and the thing the Penguin Classics have going for them is large scale production and a marketing department.
As a labor of love, though, you could definitely break even in terms of materials. I'd sell on Etsy if you plan to do physically bound editions.
I'd start with books in the public domain which are also on those Frequently Banned Book lists.
For what it's worth, if you mainly want to practice cover design and don't want to turn a profit (or maybe even if you want to do something very small-scale and under the radar - look into this, though), book titles and authors' names aren't protected under copyright. You can design all the covers to Nineteen Eighty-Four and Love in the Time of Cholera you want, as long as you're not selling the words inside. Hint. Hint. Hint.
posted by Sara C. at 12:10 PM on January 29, 2011 [1 favorite]
If Penguin can do it, so can you.
I agree with RogerB that you don't stand to make very much money on this, though. Most people aren't looking for something like this, and the thing the Penguin Classics have going for them is large scale production and a marketing department.
As a labor of love, though, you could definitely break even in terms of materials. I'd sell on Etsy if you plan to do physically bound editions.
I'd start with books in the public domain which are also on those Frequently Banned Book lists.
For what it's worth, if you mainly want to practice cover design and don't want to turn a profit (or maybe even if you want to do something very small-scale and under the radar - look into this, though), book titles and authors' names aren't protected under copyright. You can design all the covers to Nineteen Eighty-Four and Love in the Time of Cholera you want, as long as you're not selling the words inside. Hint. Hint. Hint.
posted by Sara C. at 12:10 PM on January 29, 2011 [1 favorite]
Absolutely nothing, but keep in mind that many others are already doing this and they have advantages you don't. Lulu and similar print-on-demand publishers charge a fair amount per book because they are only printing a small number of copies at a time. Larger publishers can afford to run thousands of copies at once, which pushes production costs down massively. They also have the resources to push books into bookstores and Amazon.
So if you want to do this as a design project and an experiment, I'd go for it, but I wouldn't focus on the profit motive. I'd focus on making kick ass books that people will want to buy.
posted by zachlipton at 6:05 PM on January 29, 2011 [1 favorite]
So if you want to do this as a design project and an experiment, I'd go for it, but I wouldn't focus on the profit motive. I'd focus on making kick ass books that people will want to buy.
posted by zachlipton at 6:05 PM on January 29, 2011 [1 favorite]
Well, nothing's stopping you from doing it, especially if your goal is design practice, but if your goal is to make a profit, you're not going to succeed. Doing this was actually one of the goals of the small publishing company my wife and I started. However, I found that everybody else is doing it too -- particularly Kessinger Publishing, the place with the 'yellow border' covers. They have everything, including very obscure stuff that I didn't think anybody else was doing. In trying to focus on publishing only books that aren't already everywhere, wifey and I tried to focus on books with a specific interest that aren't in print anywhere, but nowadays obscure public domain books are only a Google Books search away and anyone who wants to upload a PDF to a POD company can be a publisher. Dover has been doing it for decades, and while they've made good money at it, their market is being cut into by every entrepeneur out there.
One issue with getting typesettable ASCII text from Gutenberg is that, despite their quality controls, there's still plenty of typos. Places like Kessinger do photocopies of the original pages, no new typesetting, and thus they have less likelihood of of "rn" being typeset as "m". Also, italics, paragraphs, indentation, etc. are missing or inconsistent in the text files. To do a quality re-typesetting of an OCR'ed and proofread text file, it takes quite a bit more work than dropping it into a word processor and setting a font. I went through, page by page, comparing my typeset version to the original, and I still made mistakes.
That said, I still say, do it. I'll never be a guy to say that there are too many books in print.
posted by AzraelBrown at 7:27 PM on January 30, 2011 [1 favorite]
One issue with getting typesettable ASCII text from Gutenberg is that, despite their quality controls, there's still plenty of typos. Places like Kessinger do photocopies of the original pages, no new typesetting, and thus they have less likelihood of of "rn" being typeset as "m". Also, italics, paragraphs, indentation, etc. are missing or inconsistent in the text files. To do a quality re-typesetting of an OCR'ed and proofread text file, it takes quite a bit more work than dropping it into a word processor and setting a font. I went through, page by page, comparing my typeset version to the original, and I still made mistakes.
That said, I still say, do it. I'll never be a guy to say that there are too many books in print.
posted by AzraelBrown at 7:27 PM on January 30, 2011 [1 favorite]
« Older Where to buy Jacquot chocolates in the USA? | How does Lionel Logue sound Aussie in The King's... Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by killdevil at 10:50 AM on January 29, 2011 [3 favorites]