I read your message and realized that I just might be the "some guy" you were talking about. A while back (probably 10 - 12 years ago) I spoke with some professors about using PG texts in their classes. I thought that ebooks would be a good alternative to overpriced short press runs aimed at impoverished college students. At that time, the response I got from everyone I spoke to was that the quality of PG texts was just not high enough for academics to endorse them as a teaching tool. After hearing that, I thought very seriously about starting a publishing business that would match up young professors (badly in need of publishing credits in their hope of becoming tenured) with PG texts and bringing out edited, and possibly annotated, editions. I suspected that this could be done at a very reasonable cost and would be a benefit to the students as well as the professors. I ended up not pursuing that idea, and it's probably just as well that I didn't. A lot has changed in the past decade, notably: - Thanks to Distributed Proofreaders the accuracy of PG texts has increased -enormously-, likewise the breadth of the PG collection. - I learned that annotated editions would likely encumber public domain work with newly copyrighted material. This would limit students' ability to modify and redistribute the materials. - The rise of Creative Commons and Science Commons has given academics many new venues to publish outside of the mainstream presses. - Print on demand has become a viable business, with press runs of one copy now being profitable. - Brewster Kahle's bookmobile was just flat out cooler than anything I ever imagined, and it works really well. With all that said, I -still- this it would be great to have good quality editions of public domain works available at a reasonable cost to students and anyone else who doesn't want to overpay for a book. The limitation now in creating a print on demand service for PG books is that the main POD publishers tend to want an upfront fee to cover their setup and storage costs. In many cases, this may be about $500 per title. My guess is that this cost would be prohibitive for PG. I do not know if any POD publishers have expressed interest in waiving this fee for Project Gutenberg. Also, some PG volunteers are working on a standard system for publishing texts in a markup language called TEI-Lite. As I understand it, this markup language (it's a dialect of XML) would make it much easier to offer electronic texts in a variety of formats, including some that would be suitable for printing and binding. This markup would largely replace the academic editor I had imagined. If you decide to go forward with this idea, I would be very interested to hear more. I'm not interested in running a publishing house at this point in my life, but I would certainly want to order some books! --Ian On Jun 14, 2005, at 2:28 PM, grendelkhan wrote:
I was having a discussion with my father, and I thought I would bring it up on the mailing list, as it seems to be the place for it.
We'd just come out of our local Wal-Mart, and I'd noticed the out-of-copyright books (classics and such) being sold for $6 to $11 each. I commented that folks could just download the books for free if they wanted to read them, but he asked how many people owned a computer, and how many of those had heard of Project Gutenberg?
So I did a bit of researching, and discovered that there exist "print on demand" publishers, which instead of doing the offset-printing runs of thousands and thousands of books, will, once a book has been prepared and typeset, sometimes keep none at all in stock, and print them only when ordered.
It seems that it would be a good idea to come up with some way to offer the majority of PG's catalog through some method of print-on-demand publishing, selling at-cost. Many Gutenberg works are obscure, and not of general enough interest to warrant a print run from a traditional publisher.
I'm aware that I could clearly run off and do this myself, but (a) I wanted to get some feedback from the community at large, and (b) print-on-demand publishing still requires start-up costs, and a per-book "setup" fee of some kind, above and beyond the per-copy materials cost. Given that PG has the Distributed Proofreaders to provide lots and lots of work on worthy projects, and given that PGLAF is a charitable organization which lots of people love, is there some way to get around that issue?
Would it be worth it to provide a source of dead-tree editions of many of the archive's works? Thoughts? Objections? Pointers to some guy who's been doing this for the last ten years that I failed to Google up?
--grendelkhan _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d
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