Out of Print = Obsolete?

if:book provides more context on Amazon.com's purchase of POD firm BookSurge.

This adds cutting edge print-on-demand technology to Amazon's online retailing recipe - big news for self-published authors, but even bigger news for readers. Amazon's move suggests that print-on-demand might finally be maturing out of the terrible twos of the vanity press into a technology that redefines publishing in space and time. Imagine rare books suddenly coming back into print, and newer books staying in print longer, or indefinitely. Every book, no matter how old or obscure, could theoretically be in print, in perpetuity. Amazon already sells out-of-print or hard-to-obtain titles produced on demand by BookSurge, but their absorbing the company signals a definitive step futher into long tail bookselling. (article)

This is actually starting to make me wonder. Amazon's central place in the marketplace + legit POD technology could seriously = revolution.

It sort of does make sense that Amazon would go here, since a lot of their brand identity (sorry for the ad-man-speak) is based around the idea that they carry EVERYTHING and that they can get you any book you could ever imagine wanting. POD would obviously fit right into this. I'd have to wonder, though, how this would work with a publisher. I guess many houses would still own the rights to OOP books, and Amazon would have to secure rights to reprint. That might be sticky.

Comments

[Dan Wickett]

Scott,

I'll look for a link later on today, but I know authorsguild offers some sort of a reprint function via POD.

I've received three story collections from an author that have abut 99% of the original book completely the same - there's a comment about it being an authorsguild POD somewhere in it and I think the copyright page is different.

I'll check later and give more details as I can find them.

Enjoy,

[Michael Blowhard]

Yeah, I've heard that publishers that used to let rights revert to authors pretty easily have grown much tighter about it in recent years. Much remains to be sorted out in the world of electronic publishing. Meanwhile: blogging rules.