Since my last post on the battle over digitised books , Google has announced that in addition to providing searchable texts of books online, users will also be able to download and print certain novels. These certain novels are all classics well out of the range of copyright; Dante’s Inferno and Aesop’s Fables were given as examples.
The only true innovation here is the inclusion of the texts in Google’s special “print-ready” format. Project Gutenberg has been providing ebooks of texts in the public domain since 1991, the majority of which you are free to print out, re-post on your website, hand out on the street, wallpaper your room with, and so on, should you feel the need to wallpaper your room with Anna Karenina or A Tale of Two Cities, or, for that matter, the works of Lord Byron, a decorating scheme that is sounding increasingly appealing to me as this sentence goes on.
Project Gutenberg offers over 19,000 books as of last month, a number that is steadily growing; additionally, the Online Books Page provides a listing of where you can find over 25,000 free domain books on the web. It’s Google’s earlier bid to digitise material that still falls under copyright that has the publishing companies rioting, as this potential service would not only be unlike anything anyone else offers, but would also deprive publishers of their livelihood. After all, do we really want to put publishers out of business and then go around reading print-outs for the rest of our lives? A debate on this very topic and the value of e-books has sprung up at Pop Candy, in response to a blog post about the same news article on Google and Gutenberg.
But of course, the true merit of a societal service like Project Gutenberg is not that I could wallpaper my room with Byron’s poetic works, but that I could obtain of a text that has otherwise gone out of print. Should you prefer your out-of-print novels in a regularly bound format, the internet is still the best place to go, with many different used and new online booksellers offering to connect you with books that have fallen by the wayside of even the publisher’s Long Tail, the name given to its older backlisted titles.
BookFinder.com has taken special interest in the plea of the out-of-print book-seeker, and publishes a yearly report on the most frequently sought-out rare books. They note that “98 to 99% of all books ever published are now out of print” and are “fascinated to discover some of the choices that real readers make when they seek out books that are, by definition, not being actively marketed to them by the publishing industry.”
As the PublishersWeekly article points out, “the most notable titles were from celebrities or were lesser known works by famous writers.” Consequently Sex by Madonna tops the ‘Arts and Music’ category, Johnny Cash’s autobiography Man in Black is number one in ‘Biography,’ ‘Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror’ sees lesser-known titles by Ray Bradbury and J.R.R. Tolkien.