From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2015 20:41:49 -0400

You are being much too kind to Amazon.  If "Ulysses" is a bad example,
try another. Amazon's metadata is worse than sloppy. It's not uncommon
for Amazon to list multiple editions (hardcover, paperback, Kindle),
but the Kindle version may be of a completely different text.
Publishers seek to correct this all the time, but Amazon turns a deaf
ear.

Joe Esposito

On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 7:35 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> 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