I was reading through my 25 year collection of “The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy” ™ and I noticed that many of the books the reviewers consider to be “classics” are now out of print. It seems to me that the biggest service that the internet could provide would be E-texts of these lost classics. Why hasn’t this ever been done? Too hard to secure copyrights? To hard to transfer books to computer?
Another thing I noticed is how expensive E-books are. I read somewhere once that the price of books is DELIBERATELY inflated by 100% to cover the outmoded book return policy. It seems to me that if they sold E-books at half the price of an average paperback, they would be much more popular. How come they don’t?
Try http://www.netlibrary.com for one site.
It’s not that it’s hard getting permissions; it’s that no one is sure how to make any money from an e-book. People generally don’t want to pay for them, and if you do put something out, it invites pirated copies, something few authors want.
There are places that sell out-of-print books for e-readers. http://www.embiid.net has a small but growing stock, for instance. Aportis had a stock of public domain SF texts, along with some self-published stuff. Rocket Press seems to be doing something, too, while Wildside Press is publishing print on demand versions of some classic books. There are probably some addtional sites that have public domain works.
E-books are usually cheaper than the paperback because they don’t have returns. And to call the price “inflated” is misleading – the price is needed to cover the costs. If publishers didn’t price books so that returns were covered, they’d go out of business. They can’t easily change the method because the bookstores won’t accept anything other than full returns. It’s been high on the publisher’s wish list for years to have the ability to sell the books at a lower price but make them nonreturnable.
for boks that are no longer under copyright, here’s a great site… lots and lots and lots of classics there, too…
Glenoled
I think RealityChuck misunderstood my question. At BarnesandNoble.com the average price for a E-book is $10-$15. This may seem cheap compared to hardback books, but I still think that E-books would be more popular if they sold at $5. I bet the reason they don’t is that they don’t want to drive down the prices of regular books.
I doubt it. The reason they don’t charge $5 is they have to pay royalties on the e-books. If they charged $5, they’d have higher e-book sales and lower hardback sales, like you said, but they’d lose money on every e-book, too. I’m betting the latter is the real reason they charge more.
The problem with your answer is: they could publish paperbacks for as low as $4 IF they got rid of the book return policy. If they can publish a paperback for $4, why not E-books?