I’ve been pondering the idea of things going out of print or no longer being easily available to the general public. Categories to consider for this discussion include movies, TV shows, music, books, and video games. I’m also considering only large commercial scale projects, so someone’s home movie, homemade music video that was taken down from youtube 5 years ago, or book manuscript collecting dust in an old desk don’t count. By no longer being available I mean that they can’t be found on either virtual or physical stores that don’t specialize in old things. In other words if you can order it off Amazon, iTunes, the Kindle store, the Google Play store, the Nintendo or Sony virtual game store, or a brick and mortar stores like Best Buy, Barnes & Noble, Walmart, etc. then it’s in print. If the only place you could find it is at a garage sale or a family owned used book store specializing in rarities or someone’s estate sale, or having to contact the publisher / manufacturer directly for something they no longer make, that would count as being out of print. I would also exclude torrents and bootleg copy websites should whatever we’re considering be available only through those types of outlets.
All that being said, what can you all think of that would qualify in the categories that I mentioned? How far back do we have to go before we start running into things that are out of print?
You have an odd definition of “in print.” If you expand it to mean “you can find a few old copies for sale by third-parties on Amazon” then of course almost nothing goes out of print. But if you go by the actual definition–not currently being produced or distributed by the publisher–stuff goes out of print all the time.
Don’t have to go far back for things that are out of print. I can list a bunch of books, movies and music from the 1980s that are out of print. A bunch from the 1990s as well. Heck, I can list music albums from 2018 that are out of print already; I run into them all the time on Bandcamp. I also know of a handful of musical instruments, like my beloved Klong Yaws, that are no longer made.
The Blade by Don Novello (the funniest book ever!) has been out of print since it was printed in 1984. One print run and no more have ever been made.*
Billy Rankin’s excellent 1984 album Growin’ Up Too Fast has been OOP since 1984.
David Cammell’s White of the Eye (1987), a fantastic thriller with David Keith and Cathy Moriarity, has been OOP since the home videos were released in, IIRC, 1989.
Slayer’s box set, Soundtrack To The Apocalypse, has been OOP since it was released in 2000.
I can find more recent examples if you’d like; those are just off the top of my head.
*AFAIK, I have the largest collection of The Blade in the world; currently I own 16 of the 5000 that were printed.
I’m seeing it available new (in mass-market paperback) on Amazon. And the three “Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox” are available as an e-book.
While I think OP’s definition is a little to expansive, I do think the world of digital media does change things now a days. If a book publisher stops printing a book, but you can still get the ebook on Kindle, is it truly “out of print”?
I have no experience searching for lost films, but as far as books go, there are plenty of books, even less than 100 years old, that I have had to find in the dusty recesses of whatever particularly large archival library happened to have it- no Amazon, no bootlegs, no torrents, nothing.
Mass open digitization and cataloguing has the potential to turn this around, but that does not make the book published or “in print” in any way, shape, or form; it is the equivalent of the librarian faxing you the pages you need instead of shipping you their only copy of some incredibly rare volume (truly rare books are not loaned out, by the way).
The fact that a retailer has “new” copies of a book doesn’t necessarily mean that the publisher still has it in stock (which is what I interpret “in print” to mean). If the book is “out of print,” then if Amazon runs out of stock of it, they wouldn’t be able to order more copies from the publisher.
I would imagine that it’s possible for new copies of a book to be floating around in the retail pipeline for a long time after the publisher no longer has any copies of it in stock (and has no plans to re-print it).
What about Disney’s practice of releasing its movies on VHS/DVD/Bluray for a time and then pulling them from the market for seven years? I don’t have specific titles in mind but I think that means that a bunch of the Disney films were out of print for a long time recently.
Video games can go “out of print” when studios shut down and rights get tied up between companies. Recently Telltale Games went out of business and their games were removed from online catalogs. Since then, some of them have been picked up by other studios/publishers and other licensed rights have reverted to their original IP holder so the fate of the games is still unknown.
Other games may stop being published/sold because licensed music rights expire and the game no longer sells enough copies to be worth renewing them. Sometimes you get a “new” version of the game without the licensed music and sometimes it just gets shelved indefinitely.
I play board games and it’s a complicated question. A lot of games have a print run; they’ll make a few thousand copies and sell them to a distributor who then sells them to stores and individual customers.
So is the game out of print? No, in the sense that it’s available in stores. But yes, in the sense that no copies of the game are being made anymore.
What happens is people buy up the copies and the game becomes increasingly hard to find. At what point do you say it’s no longer available? Is a game still in print is there’s a copy sitting on a shelf in a store that’s two thousand miles away from me and I don’t know exists?
We also live in the blessed age of print-on-demand, where you can get your hands on all sorts of forgotten literature. They ain’t beautiful volumes, but are fine as reader’s copies.
Off the top of my head, I have on my shelves Guy Thorne’s When it Was Dark, a screwy 1903 pro-Christian novel recommended by atheist Christopher Hichens as a hoot; H.G. Wells’s The Research Magnificent; and the complete poems of George Sterling.
A lot of independent record labels went out of business in the past decade or so and not everything was snatched up by a new label/distributor. So you will see some albums considered “underground classics” that are no longer being manufactured on physical while also not legally available on download or streaming services.
I have to say that the premise of this thread strikes me as a little peculiar. Asking people to list things that are out of print is a bit like saying “list people who have died” or “list businesses that have gone under.” Published materials go out of print all the time, everywhere, and there’s nothing unusual or remarkable about it.
Also, as Darren Garrison notes, the OP is using a non-standard definition of “out of print.” Many OOP items are available through third-party sellers on Amazon; that’s my first stop when looking for anything that’s out of print. If you include abebooks.com in the mix, then you can find practically any book you can think of. I can’t understate how much easier it is to find OOP books now. In the 1980s and 90s I went to considerable time and effort to acquire all of my favorite author’s novels, most of which were long out of print; this involved writing to rare book dealers to request catalogs, asking bookstore owners to call me when something came in, visiting used book dealers when I traveled, etc. Now I could probably order all of them in an hour without getting up from my comfy chair.
As a couple of people have pointed out, libraries are an excellent option if you don’t need to own a book yourself. Your local public library would be happy to get things for you via interlibrary loan (although you might need to travel if you want to see something particularly rare). I spent 30 years working in university libraries, and they have so many out of print books that they’re constantly running out of space to store them.
That’s an excellent point. Publishers can keep ebooks on their backlist indefinitely, without the expense of maintaining a physical inventory. I’d consider such things “in print,” even if the publisher has stopped printing paper copies.
This is a major complaint of authors. For older book contracts, a book that remains in print is still licensed to the publisher. This means that the author cannot get his rights back. So if someone wants to republish your old novel in a deluxe edition, you can’t agree to it as long as it’s available online via POD.
Rights used to revert to the author after a set period. At that point, the author could try to publish the book in a new edition. This option doesn’t exist if the book remains in print, and publishers often point to POD or ebooks as proof the book is in print.
Older books usually reverted to their author. Recent novels usually define “in print” in such a way as to prevent this. But there’s a large number of novels in the 90s and 00s that remain in print indefinitely.
A lot of artists are now self-publishing and producing CDs on their own; I see this with lots of people on Bandcamp. So they print up, say 1000 CDs and when they’re gone, they’re gone.
That’s a pretty enervated standard. You’re basically saying something should be considered “in print” as long as it’s possible to print a copy if somebody wants one. But that standard, I could say that my collected posts on this board are in print.
I’m seeing it available new (in mass-market paperback) on Amazon. And the three “Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox” are available as an e-book.