I’ve downloaded a lot of digitised out of copyright books in PDF form. The Internet Archive is a particularly good source for these. But some older books are not available there, but they are available in print on demand reprint. This includes a large number of British Library books, which were digitised in conjunction with Microsoft, and later made available as print on demand through Amazon’s CreateSpace service.
I’ve just been looking for an old history of Selkirkshire, a two-volume book by Thomas Craig-Brown which was originally published in 1886. I’d like to look at this again – I last peeked at it briefly in the 1980s – because I believe it has some interesting things to say about one of my most characterful ancestors. But neither university library nearby has a copy, and it hasn’t been digitised as part of the Internet Archive. But it is available as print on demand through the British Library / Amazon collaboration, which would allow me to read the text. I found a secondhand copy of the 1886 original, but at 500 pounds I won’t be buying it!
The problem is I can’t tell by looking at the Amazon listings for the print on demand books what I’d be buying. There are two listings for this title, both described as “The History of Selkirkshire; Or, Chronicles of Ettrick Forest”, “published” one month apart. I suspect they are volume 1 and volume 2 of the book (possibly the other way round), but the page counts don’t exactly match the printed original volumes clearly, and there is no indication of volume numbers on the Amazon listings. So I’m really not sure.
I’ve asked Amazon to check for me. They can surely look at the source files. Or pick up the print on demand copies lurking in warehouses and have a peek.
What I don’t want to do is guess and buy blind. At least this book was only published once, so I’m not worrying about which edition I’m getting. But the bibliographic details on the Amazon site for these print on demand books are extremely poor and uninformative. I’m not very impressed, wearing my book historian’s hat, plus wanting to make a canny purchase.
But hopefully Amazon Customer Services will be able to sort out the query for me.
I feel your pain and I regret that Amazon is unlikely to help since hey don’t seem to have access to the digital editions themselves (or are unwilling to do so). I have found that one can get some idea of content by sticking to certain imprints in the POD market. Nabu press is one of the Lighting Source (now Bibliolife?) imprints and is the least reliable. There is no real quality control and their bibliographical entries on Amazon are unhelpful (particularly with multi-volume editions). However, anything from Gale ECCO, or the British Library digitial editions hold promise. The page counts will never match because they add preliminaries and there are often extra leaves to fit into the standard numbers for the POD machines.
As a possible work-around you could check with Yale University Bookstore, or any of the other University or commercial owners of an Espresso bookmachine and see if they can look at the digital file for the relevant title. I asked bout a multi-volume version of Matthew of Paris and they were helpful (they checked and found the version they had lacked a title page so they couldn’t actually identify what volume was what). Also, look up the copies of the book that the BL has and use those page counts as reference as those are the specific items used for the digital version.
That’s my ‘off the top of my head’ advice. Good luck.
I am also confused with several companies offering Print On Demand
Books. Lately, I have noticed Repressed Publishing Company printed
several books that I wanted to add to my Library. Could someone share
their experience regarding the POD of Repressed Publishing?
Thanks
you will have to pay handsomely for the original-limited edition & leather bound. The paperback is worth it about £20 on many websites
Oh I know the paperback version is good value. But I still can’t tell which volume I need because of Amazon’s inadequate bibliographic details, and contacting Amazon was no help at all unfortunately. So I haven’t bought it. I really just want it for reference purposes, in which case I’m happy to wait until I’m at the National Library of Scotland or similar to recheck the original, and be sure exactly what I’m looking at.