I’m going to be a bit rambly today, I suspect. Sleep last night was elusive and the allodynia is not recommended because ow, and also, there’s nothing really you can do about it but take anti-inflammatories and hope. Although I did discover that a counter-irritant against the nerve, in the form of a cold damp cloth, shut it up long enough to fall asleep, for at least a little bit, until it flared elsewhere on the nerve. Whee. Anyway…
When I’m sick, I binge-read. And since I’m three weeks and counting into this, after a week of huge stress and sh*t that had me getting sick, I’ve been reading. A lot. I generally go back to mysteries for my binging (although not always) and Amazon helpfully suggests ‘you might also enjoy…’ which sometimes is helpful in the form that damp cloth was, as an irritant. I tend to use Kindle Unlimited for said binging, since I can easily read 3-4 books in a day where I can’t sleep, everything hurts, and I just want to escape from the misery. And this last week, I learned why I can’t rely on the public library for this sort of thing any longer. You see, the books have disappeared…
I’d been recommended by the Also-bot (Amazon’s dim but friendly algorithm, like a dog fetching everything but the stick you threw) the first of the Tony Hillerman Navajo mysteries. I have vague but pleasant memories of reading a few of these when I was in my teens, out of order as you did in the era before Amazon and easy access to a whole series (luxuries!). So I got it, realized that at points in the past I’ve bought a few of the ebooks when they were on sale for like $1.99 and settled in to read. Somewhere around book 6 I clicked through to get the next and… what do you mean, it’s $12.99? I looked. Thirty year old books, $12.99 and up, through the rest of the series of twenty-odd books. Oh, well, crud. Hey, we have to go to town, I’ll drop into the used bookstore and pick some paperbacks up…
They know me there. I go in not feeling up to par and actually ask, before wandering around the stacks, where they’d shelve Hillerman. Gen fic, westers, and SFF are all in different places at this store, and I’ve seen him in all of those places before. Scattered across a large building. They weren’t sure, but after the third strike-out the volunteer (this place is run by Friends of the Library) said ‘wait here!’ and headed for the back. Since ‘here’ was classics, military history, and Texiana as well as the Westerns, I was happy to do as I was told. On return, I was told that there is a box of overstock for all the big-name popular authors, and the one named Hillerman is empty. “We had some. Someone must have come in and bought all of them!” I didn’t leave empty-handed. I bought a Wodehouse and Jack London’s Stories of Hawaii, and plotted a trip to the library. Which was the next day because energy levels. At the library, where according to the catalog they had two Hillermans (neither of them in the Navajo mystery series) I struck out again. Went home, ordered four through Thriftbooks (look, I can get them for like $4 each there and Thriftbooks cleverly buys my loyalty by letting me earn free books with purchases). Contemplated the fleeting nature of life, books, and how a mere few decades can erase what was a hugely popular book series.
I understand why the library doesn’t carry them. The library only has so much space, and so much budget. Paperbacks wear out too fast, even if they are (generally) smaller than hardbacks. When a book isn’t being checked out, the decision is inevitable: it has to go. On a series that is decades old? Simple math. Until someone like me comes along, or the series is optioned for a TV or film thing, and even then, these days, the library isn’t going to restock the books until patrons ask. I wasn’t going to ask them to order books – I’ll read a few more, and then stop about halfway into the 28 book series because on Hillerman’s death his daughter started writing them, with a different main character, and I’m actually studying Hillerman’s storytelling, as well as enjoying the stories. I’d say someone is buying them since the publisher has them priced as high as new releases, but I suspect that’s not the case, either. Pricing on backlists is erratic, and I’ve come to think that publishers aren’t actually interested in selling old books.
I am, though. I wrote Possum Creek Massacre several years ago, and it never sold as well as I thought it should. It is darker than my usual, to be fair. However, when the call for the Based Book Summer Sale went out, I submitted it, and set up the sale price at $0.99 because the best way to attract new readers is to give them a low cost of entry (like me up there with the Hillerman Book #1 in KU). Then I thought about it, and thought ‘self, the best way to sell the last book is to publish the next book’ and I went looking. I knew I’d written a novelette as a sequel, and started writing another that would also fit into the bridge between Possum Creek Massacre and the planned next novel in the Witchward series. I took what I had, edited, spliced, edited some more, wrote a couple of thousand words to create a satisfying ending that slots right into the next novel, and set it up for publication. Child of Crows is a novella and it’s now available for preorder. (that link is an affiliate link, and if you buy anything through it, I get a little income which helps).
Will my books be available in forty years? Kind of depends on my heirs, or me if I’m around at age 90. Will anyone care? Well, that’s a whole different question. I doubt it, this is a numbers game and I just don’t have the numbers of a big seller from back in the day… but then again, who knows. I can say that I’ll not have them priced at $12.99!
Mad Genius Club 
18 responses to “Disappearing Books and New Ones”
Ouch! Hope you get to feeling better!
I suspect with eBooks and Print on Demand, we’re going to see the long tail get very long.
Been picking into Battletech, and one of the issues with long running Wargames is, unless they’re very popular, it’s hard to justify continued reprints of sour books. But CGL, the current IP holder, is actively selling PDFs of the older source books. And I’ve heard are looking into Print on Demand versions as well. And, with all of that, I’m actually poking around to see where, and even if, I can get some of the pdf campaign books printed out in hardback for reasonablish prices.
With that, I now find myself wondering if it’s possible to, say, get old out of copyright pulp novels printed in paperback sized hardcover? A lot of Sherlock Holmes and Conan is in the public domain.
There are definitely a *lot* of people republishing public domain books, and some are doing print versions. Some are even nicely editing and formatting those print versions, but unfortunately a lot are just doing sloppy OCR scans and really terrible formatting if you look at reviews and samples.
Well, I also wonder if we’re going to see people setting up their own prints, and doing very small runs for their local friend and bookworm groups.
And the old becomes new again…
Yes but also.
The Doyle and Howard estates are both… tetchy… about anything being in the public domain.
The Howard estate is actually a Scandawegian guy who bought the rights to everything Howard wrote (in spite of the fact that nothing got renewed by his heirs, and only a few years of Weird Tales got renewed by the publisher). While being one of the (very very) few good stewards of a literary estate, he/his company also takes an expansive view of his/their rights. I.e., Conan may be in the public domain, but you may not write new Conan stories without his permission. (He gets there by bootstrapping trademark law in ways it was not intended to be used, and the fact that litigation is expensive.) And let me reiterate, this is one of the few GOOD stewards.
Hope you feel better soon.
$12.99 for a decades-old eBook? Publisher doesn’t want to sell them, I guess.
We do sell some of our eBooks for $9.99 but they are HUGE file sizes and if we want to make a few bucks, we don’t have much choice. It’s a careful decision and not one to make lightly.
I’d never sell fiction at $12.99 per title. You’re telling Potential New Reader to go someplace else.
Oh I have no qualms about paying ten, twenty, even thirty bucks for a really solid non-fiction book particularly one I’ll use for research repeatedly. A fiction ebook I’m highly unlikely to re-read and I’m not supporting a living author? Not so much.
Exactly!
$145.00 for an ebook. Archaeology monograph that would be very, very useful but … I might see if I can ILL [inter-library loan] the hard copy instead. I’ve seen non-fiction e-books over $500 US, but the print versions cost, um, “If I won the lottery or got a huge federal grant.”
Yeah, there are things I’m looking at going “I wonder if it would be cheaper to take the occasional class at the local Uni for library access?”
Depending on the library policies, you may be able to just get access even if you don’t take classes.
And I don’t think there’s anything stopping one from reading the books in the library without checking them out….
The one limit might be university libraries that do not permit anyone to use/enter the facility without university ID. Some places put that in as a security precaution after a spate of assaults by people not affiliated with the colleges back in the 2010s.
That was how I ended up reading some of the later and weirder volumes of History of Middle Earth, was when I went back to college.
I’ve gotten some amazing books via the interlibrary loan. DVDs too, for various projects.
They’re my first choice. It’s always worth asking.
Sometimes we have to pay to borrow but for a real rarity that’s $25 to borrow, it’s still cheaper than buying the book.
Absolutely. TxRed mentioned a book that was like $145 to buy the ebook. A $25 ILL would be a steal in comparison.
Ebooks priced high are usually a hard no for me, though I just paid $200 for a research book that I have wanted since it was published 30+ years ago, called The Celtic Sword. This is a detailed examination of the typology, manufacture, and archeology of Celtic bronze swords. This may have been a Doctoral dissertation picked up for a limited publication. The original price was $100, but that was out of my budget then.
I read books for pleasure, as so much of what I read otherwise is concerning and / or political, and because my internal imaging of the stories of good writers can be as detailed as I want it to be at that time.
Thanks to all the good writers who express their thoughts well.
John in Indy
On occasion, I’ve had to look up the electrical code. As memory serves, they used to sell both dead-tree plus a complete eBook, but also offered the content for free on a non-downloadable basis.
The current code book is $169 print, with the Handbook (explaining the Why of the codes) some $308. They’re now offering the eBooks on a subscription basis, ranging from $12 to $14 a month. With some luck, I won’t need to review any of this. My circa 1990s Handbook covers the basics, though more modern topics (*cough* Solar *cough*) needed a look at the current version.
The subscription model is a mild pain, but for occasional use, I would be willing. If I can’t find the free version (they used to hide it, but not thoroughly).