From: Wilhelmina Randtke <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2015 14:57:23 -0400

I think Ulysses is a bad example.  There are many editions.  From the
beginning it got censored and there was some shape shifting to try and
get copyright coverage across national borders.  The problem isn't
publishers now; it's the whole history of that work.  It's a case
study in publishing oddities, starting with the very first publication
of the first chapter.  It also was used as a case study in copyright
oddities in the recent Without Copyrights, so saying it's public
domain isn't the same as it would be for a book that was published in
definitive form in 1922.  You say that "You just want the real thing."
but here that's meaningless.  You are picky about what you don't want
only, but probably if you already knew which edition you liked, then
you could find that one.  Same thing if you pick a random foreign
language book then don't like the translation.  Same thing if you want
a bible and "just want the real thing" but then don't like any of the
translations you randomly click on and don't know of a translation you
like.  It's so inherently complicated and twisty that you need to know
before you look exactly what you want, and you cannot reasonably
expect anyone in a bookstore, library, or online support to know the
publishing history of the specific book you are looking for.

It's silly to pick a book with so many editions and maybe no
definitive edition at all (you can't name you preferred edition for
Ulysses), then say that shows how disorganized publishing is now.

This also has nothing to do with eBook vs print vs print-on-demand.
Ulysses is a hot mess as a fluke of its entire publication history
from day 1.

-Wilhelmina Randtke


On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 6:36 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 17 Sep 2015 10:28:53 -0700
>
> I had very few comments offline and none on-list to my request to
> identify e-book vendors we might find it easy and productive to work
> with.  Are there really no exciting choices out there?  With five
> campuses and tens of thousands of online degree candidates, we need to
> be able to deliver digital content as much as possible, but the
> present set of choices we see is unsustainable.
>
> And it's not getting any easier to buy print books -- quite the
> reverse, as I learned in a startlign experience last night.   Imagine
> that you want to buy a copy of Joyce's Ulysses.  You want a well-made
> paperback book, new from the publisher, with a reliably edited and
> proofread text.  There are a couple of oddities about editions of
> Ulysses and the work is now in the public domain.  You don't want the
> "original 1922 edition", which was fairly widely spread around for a
> while when it was supposedly public domain and the corrected edition
> was not; and you'd just as soon avoid the controversial 1980s Gabler
> edition.  You just want the real thing.
>
> You can duplicate this experiment by going to Amazon and searching for
> the book:  easy to do.  What you will find are dozens of pages of hits
> with a vast mishmash of dumped-to-digital e-books of dubious
> provenance, dumped-to-POD p-books equally dubious, secondhand copies
> of classic editions you recognize but can't be sure what condition
> they're in.  When I did the experiment, I gave up because I don't
> actually need a copy right now but because I genuinely could not find
> one that met my relatively simple criteria -- new, well-made, reliable
> edition.  This problem is one part "everybody's a publisher"
> superabundance of offerings, but it's another part Amazon's failure to
> pay heed to metadata.
>
> One example:  when you get a given title on Amazon, it generally lets
> you choose among Kindle, hardcover, paperback, and sometimes audiobook
> versions of the same book.  Time after time on the Ulysses pages, you
> will be given that choice, but the three or four versions whose tabs
> appear on the same screen turn out, when you click on a tab, to be
> *completely* different editions.  What looked like a possible
> contender for the paperback choice offered a "hardcover" tab that
> linked to an out-of-print edition by a completely different publisher.
>
> A reasonable person on this quest for the Joycean grail would give up
> and go look for a bookstore.  I was shocked.
>
> Jim O'Donnell/ASU