RE: books for sale

["Okerson, Ann" <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

Yes, and libraries that have put up their out-of-copyright books 
online are finding them in various surprising places, for sale as 
printed items, from publishers one never heard of before.  Some 
are better produced, some worse.  They're priced below Amazon 
prices, but not much...

We aren't in the business of recovering costs, so on the $$ level 
this is okay, but some part of me wishes that they'd at had the 
courtesy of getting in touch and saying who they are, what 
they're doing with the library's well-digitized content.

Ann Okerson/Yale Library

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
On Behalf Of James J. O'Donnell
Sent: Sunday, October 31, 2010 8:05 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: books for sale

Jan Velterop pointed to a Suddeutsche Zeitung article about books 
that appear to be no more than compilation of Wikipedia articles. 
The book highlighted in that article came from the publisher 
whose URL and "about" appear below and bear reading.  "10,000 new 
titles" and "copyleft projects" are phrases that will give food 
for thought.

Such books are an additional contribution to a new flood of 
"books for sale" on familiar sites, including Amazon and 
Abebooks.  Cassiodorus is a sixth century AD author I've known 
for many years.  Look for him on Abebooks now and find that of 
the first 50 hits for that author, forty are print-on-demand 
reprints from Google books and the like of volumes of very 
limited, if any, value.  The lowest-priced several copies 
available offer a title that he never wrote, but that appears to 
be a garbled version of something he did write.  Three of the top 
50 are scholarly monographs of very limited value and reach, but 
at least they are real books at real prices.  The other seven are 
copies of a 1946 translation of one of his works whose 
introductory section of c. 60 pages was, as I pointed out in 
print thirty years ago, substantially plagiarized from a 19th 
century volume.  It gets harder and harder to buy a good book.

Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown

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