eBooks resurrecting out-of-print titles

[PaulMc]

(edited from my blog, a bit rambling but it does have a point)

I am currently reading, Slaine: The Exile, which is a novel tie-in with a comic. (The comic comes from Britain?s 2000AD line.) The novel came out in 2006, and a sequel followed in 2007. The novel was published by Black Flame, who were a division of BL Publishing. (Their main arm is Black Library, who publish the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 novels.) Black Flame published media tie-in novels. In addition to 2000AD titles, they also novelized some movies into novel series.

I thought about buying the second Slaine novel, but then decided to wait until I read the first novel. Black Flame folded in 2007. As a result, the second Slaine novel, Slaine: The Defiler, is already rare. Now, the first novel isn?t sending me into the stratosphere, but I?d be curious to go on to the second novel, but not at the prices out there.

Foiled again by ?out-of-print?!

Or am I?

I was poking around Wikipedia yesterday, and learned that BL Publishing sold off the 2000AD novels of Black Flame to another company, Rebellion Developments, in 2009. Rebellion have made the titles available as eBooks.

I hopped over to Amazon, and checked the Kindle Store.

Sure enough, the titles are there. They seem reasonably priced - $5.59 per novel.

This perfectly illustrates one of the aspects of eReaders/eBooks that I am most excited about. They can make out-of-print books available. I love hunting used book stores, and if I really want something, I?ll try eBay or ABE Books. But what if the book is so rare, I just can?t get a hold of it?

Imagine all those yellow spine DAW books, Karl E. Wagner?s Kane stories, Robert Adams Horseclans, Sadler?s Casca or the Falcon series by ?Mark Ramsay? (house author started by John Maddox Roberts) being available with a mere download.

I grant that Rebellion had an advantage with Black Flame. The Black Flame books, being so new, probably were already on a computer and just needed a formatting pass to make them eReader ready. Older books will require some upfront time and money to be transcribed to computer. I have no idea what it costs a publisher to bring an older book online, but I would hope it would be recovered with a minor amount of sales. (Need to keep the cost attractive.) But it doesn?t cost them printing or warehouse space, certainly.

Will more out-of-print (but not public domain) titles become more and more available via eReaders?

Time will tell. I, for one, certainly hope so!

[Jaqhama]

I'd like to see a complete re-printing of 2000 AD and Starlord from the first issues myself.
The FLESH story in 2000 AD was great. (I've got issue one of Starlord, actually.)
Judge Dread never did much for me. Too cardboard a character.
I've got a Stronium Dog novel.

[Window Bar]

I, too, just downloaded and read a classic: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. My only sadness about this is that there will be less time in readers' schedules to read new works.

[SilviaMG]

C.J.Cherry and some other authors launched Closed Circle recently in order to bring their out of print titles back in the market in ebook fashion. It certainly allows writers to put out some of their old, out of print titles in the market once more.
Btw, there's no need to "transcribe" much stuff. Most modern scanners come with a decent OCR. Transferring the resulting PDF into text files is a matter of finding the right software (some of it is free) and batch processing. Even the manual line returns can be automated to a certain extent.
If you don't want to do it yourself (no desire to stand by the scanner, or you don't have a large scanning machine that will feed the pages automatically) you can pay someone to do it. I was recently considering sending one of my old books from the 40s to be scanned, then reprinted and bound again to a company that specializes in such stuff. I'm sure you can find someone else who would, for a cheaper price, rip apart a hardcover or paperback and feed the pages through the PDF mill, then covert it all to a text file.
After all, book pirates do it all the time, and for peanuts! I bet an organized published can do better than the pirates. I hope.
I did a mini-version of this when I interviewed Tanith Lee. She sent me answers to an interview typed on paper. I scanned the pages, and voila! No need to transcribe. The scanner even picked up some of her handwritten corrections without a glitch. I transferred all to Word and did a screen comparison. Worked well.