From: Karin Wikoff <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 18 Sep 2015 11:22:24 +0000

You need a good book jobber.  Was so sad when BUSCA closed their
doors.  They were the best. :-(

Karin

-----Original Message-----
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