All,

I briefly touched upon this issue in an earlier thread. It appears that a new industry of print-on-demand books, usually from scanned copies, has sprung up on the web and thorugh the usual suspects of online book dealers. These appear to be reprints of out-of-copyright works that are paired with a very generic, clip-art like cover.

Unfortunately, some of the descriptions are not descriptive enough to determine what the actual original year of publication is. For example:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Locomotive-Cyclopedia-of-American-Practice-/350641009947?pt=US_Texbook_Education&hash=item51a3d5351b
(I have no interest, financial or otherwise, in this auction)

Has anybody purchased these? Any comments on the quality?

I realize that these are likely online through Google Books, but some people prefer the good-old-fashioned paper copy. Any inuput on this subject is welcome.

I have bought a couple of POD books and was overall fairly satisfied - one was very crisp and another seemed out of focus. For the particular item you linked, I don't think I would take the plunge, even for $40.00.

"*Dimensions: 7.44 x 9.69 x 1.46 inches"

Speaking for myself, I can imagine it getting VERY old, VERY fast, using a magnifying glass to see the print and drawings.

Another thing that has me curious is the Locomotive Dictionary was first published in 1906 by resolution of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Railway Master Mechanics' Association (RMMA). Revisions to the Locomotive Dictionary were released in 1909, 1912, 1916 and 1919.

In 1921, the RMMA changed the name to the Locomotive Cyclopedia of American Practice with the first edition under that title being 1922. My copy is 1155 pages.

The Nabu Press item is listed as having 698 pages. My 1906 LD reprint has about that many pages. I don't know how many pages the 1912 or 1916 editions have but the 1919 edition is over 1100 pages. You can download a PDF of the 1906 and 1909 editions free from Google Books.

Until I get some good feedback on these guys, I'm not shelling out the green stamps.

*

I've been studying this for awhile. A lot is going on.

First, let's talk content. If you've ever searched for a valuable keyword, and landed on a page with a bunch of ads and a terrible article... that stuff was written to trick search engines, and can be licensed very cheaply. Of course, anything pre-1923 is public domain. Wikipedia is free under GPL. And frankly, nothing stops these guys from stealing.


Any new technology brings the bottom-feeders. WIth book-on-demand, we got the content mills dump publishing, like these guys who had a book for the Southern Michigan Railroad. It was the SMRS's Wikipedia page with a bunch of crap to fill it out.

They certainly don't hand-curate all this. Either the content is compiled automatically, or they hand-edit the book AFTER you order it, because orders are not that common.

Or they may simply be selling a pre-1923 book they obtained by scraping Google Books, again with automated software.

Since the cover is presented pre-sale, these must be pre-made. Given the sheer quantity, there are simply too many to possibly human-curate. They must be done in mass by automated scripts. The photos are picked by computer from catalogs of stock photos they have licensed.

Amazon has cracked down on this spew. Their book-on-demand subsidiary, CreateSpace, calls it the greatest threat to on-demand publishing.


That seller has 4,000,000 listings on eBay. But only 48,000 feedback. That suggests that any particular title sells extremely rarely.

They seem to be listing everything in a book-on-demand publisher's catalog. That catalog is, in turn, stuffed with public-domain content assembled like I describe above. Since these books are simply too numerous to have ever been touched by human hands, it's impossible to guess as to their quality.


Well, you are their target audience. They want you to pay a fortune simply to have it on paper.

If it were ME, I would read it on Google Books because the indices are hot-linked and it is searchable.

But if I were YOU, I would pull the PDF down from Google Books and send it to the book on demand printer of your choice. It's exactly what they'll do, but cheaper and without the scammy middlemen. Also, you can control binding and type size.

Which one are you looking for, by the way?
http://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm= ... can&num=10

Newton K. Gregg did a nice reprint of the 1906 edition of The Locomotive Dictionary, of which I just picked up a copy of. I need to compare it to the Periscope Publications version. I have both, but they haven't shown up near each other to compare.