From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2017 18:19:46 -0700

I had a question about the classic Books in Print reference tool:
would it be possible from a digital version thereof to extract
information about not only when a particular item was published but
when it went out of print?  Of course I had a particular book in mind,
Gilbert Murray's Rise of Greek Epic (Oxford 1907).  I am very sure
that it was in print as a paperback c. 1971.  Could I test that memory
and see when it last appeared in Books In Print.

WIth a little time in the BIP database, I am skeptical, but I think it
probably cannot be done:  they haven't incorporated historical
information, or at least not in a useful way.  But am I wrong?  I'd
love to be.

But here's what I discovered on this quest to give pause.  Murray's
book is long out of copyright, and so *today* it very certainly is "in
print", after a manner of speaking.  There are 34 different choices of
print-on-demand "editions", all functionally identical for their
comment (and likely deriving, I suspect, from a copy in the Internet
Archive), from six "publishers".  Nineteen of them owe their
provenance to BibioBazaar, but the nineteen copies vary in price from
$16 to $33.

What this makes me realize is that the "in print" category has lost
all meaning.  Once upon a time, the fact of a book's availability was
some kind of sign that someone thought it had merit or a market or
some hope of being sold once in a while, and that was a rough proxy
for books of at least some interest.  In fact, nobody but historians
of classical scholarship *should* read the Murray book now (too much
scholarly water under the bridge since then), but It's more readily
available than many better and more recent books.

This observation can of course be turned into two trenchant
observations about Open Access:  (1) Wouldn't it be reat if everything
were freely available like this?  (2) Wouldn't it be awful if
everything were available like this?

Jim O'Donnell
Arizona State University