Gollancz republishes loads of out of print novels ..

[MarkC]

.. as ebooks.

I think most people visiting this sub-forum will be aware of Victor Gollancz, long standing UK publisher of sci-fi and fantasy books. Whilst looking for a copy of 'The Compleat Traveller in black' by John Brunner today - something I've done from time to time over the last decade - which I read when I was in the sixth form (around about the last time it was in print), I discovered that amazon had dozens of his out of print novels available to buy as kindle downloads.

A bit more research lead me to http://www.sfgateway.com/ which is all about the project, dedicated to making the back catalogues of many F&SF authors available in ebook form. I think this is a fabulous idea, doubtless few of these books would have a chance of being reprinted in conventional print and paper form, making them available as ebooks avoids the risk to the publisher of paying for a print run that may sit unsold for a very long time, while having them available to those like me that still want to read these hard to find stories. Seems a perfect fit of modern technology to a longstanding problem. I can see my kindle is going to fill up and my bank account empty!

[tagesmann]

This is one of the things that I hoped would happen with ebooks. If the publisher has the book in an electronic format (ready for the printer) then it should be easy - and cheap - to convert to an e-format. Hopefully we could end the out-of-print experience

[Ailecornum]

Me too, Tagesmann and I was pleased to see other publishers are getting into the act. The smell of books blog has an article 'Out of print out of mind' at http://www.thesmellofbooks.com/ detailing authors like Vita Sackville West and Gerald Durrell - not exactly scifi, but out of print, nonetheless.

[Grammath]

I agree this is a great initiative and that it should mean that the concept of a book being out of print is consigned to the dustbin of history. I wonder if, since Gollancz is now part of one of the UK's largest publishers (Hachette Livre) this will be rolled out to other non-genre imprints if it is successful. Sci-fi types are likely to be early adopters of new technology too, after all.

What I hope would happen is that, longer term, a print on demand service was developed alongside this initiative for those who want physical copies of the books too. Academic publishing looks like it might already be starting down this path.

Like Penguin, Gollancz books have a distinctive cover design (they all used to look like these 50th anniversary editions (http://www.gollancz50.com/) produced earlier this year) so it would be easy enough to produce such books and have them look like books rather than glorified manuscripts.