Book publishing
The term ‘in print’ dates from the late 1400s, about the time of the first printing press invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440. This term often refers to whether a book is currently being offered for sale by a publisher, and its antonym ‘out of print‘ refers to the fact that the book is no longer being published. The contracts offered by publishers to authors often require a minimum number of annual sales for the book to be continued printing, usually between 150-250 sales. While the book remains ‘in print’ the rights belong to the publisher. The reversion-of-rights clause included in contracts states that if the book goes out of print or the publisher stops reprinting the book for a certain amount of time, then all rights revert to the author.
A fairly new phenomenon is ‘print on demand’, where books that are not selling well are kept on a database so that copies can be printed on request. This is a more cost effective and space efficient method of keeping the book available, rather than storing unsold books in a warehouse. This in effect would mean that books would never go out of print, implying that the rights would never revert to the author. The CEO of Simon & Schuster said “that the only books he could envision going out of print were time-sensitive works” (Seattle Times, 2007). These time-senstive works could include texts that would no longer be useful after a period of time – textbooks, dictionaries, tax guides, and so on.
Where to find out of print books?
Out of print books can be quite rare and valuable due to the difficulty in acquiring them. The limited availability of the books can contribute to them being quite sought after as a collector’s item. While publishers occasionally do reprints of certain classics, the best way to find out of print is not in your local bookstore but with bookstores that specialise in rare books. Especially handy are online specialist bookstores in antiquarian and rare books.
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