Quote:
Originally Posted by Little.Egret
But The Worthing Chronicle by Orson Scott Card has an Venture Press imprint of Endeavour Press copyright page just like Space Trap
Why they eshew Canada but not UK I don't know.
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Well, in the case of
The Worthing Chronicle, it appears that Endeavour only has the rights for it in regions outside of the US & Canada (I'd have said North America, but it turns out that they offer it in Mexico as well).
As for the usual sort of sfnal "freebies" from well-known recent authors that show up in the UK but not Canada, that's actually very common with those public domain-repackaging publishers who happen to be less than scrupulous about marking exactly which countries they're "allowed" to re-sell those US-PD unrenewed copyright rules that a bunch of vintage golden age sf/fantasy/pulp mystery falls under.
There's at least two such re-publishers who regularly re-offer a bunch of Philip K. Dick and other dead-but-not-otherwise-PD-except-for-selected-works-in-the-US authors (and some living ones, as well) even in the UK (but not Canada).
How it usually happens is if they also sell their books outside of Amazon (and quite a few of them do, according to the Google Play search results that end up cluttering the page when I'm looking for current legit in-print stuff) and rely on the price-matching to drop a few of their works to free (presumably to promote the sales on the rest of their "catalogue"), then the drops usually happen first in the US and UK (probably due to larger userbases willing to click the "Report a Lower Price" function), with Canada becoming a distant third, if ever, to see the price go to $0.00 and show up free in the listings for us.
So, works from authors of a certain age with little self-publishing visibility which pop up in the listings from obscure publishers with that pattern tend to be automatically suspect, IMHO. And sometimes even the known publishers* can mistakenly mark something wrongly, and IIRC, Endeavour does very occasionally do PD reprints and offer them free (or maybe I've just conflated all those "sequels" based on PD works like Raffles which they also offer).
Anyway, the Orson Scott Card is indeed, as you noted, a genuine Venture freebie that they seem to be offering to promote whatever else in his back-catalogue that they've acquired (hopefully the stuff which contains less of the views he's become rather notorious for espousing on his blog and donating time and money to groups which try to enforce those views, with some success overseas in Uganda, apparently).
Thanks for alerting us to it! (And thanks also to koland for taking the time to dig up the direct URL for it, which is usually unfindable outside of countries that it's eligible for.)
* But to balance things out, some publishers such as Open Road Media are actually very scrupulous, perhaps overly so, with the US PD-reprints they offer. They've got 99 cent Dorothy L. Sayers and Patricia Wentworth mysteries which are only PD in the US because of the rules, which they occasionally offer as their daily PD freebie.
Those are completely unavailable outside the US, including Canada, even though they could re-sell the entirety of those authors' non-posthumous works for us under our Life+50 rules. But at they're erring on the side of actually trying not to make extra $$$ from the unwary in places where they shouldn't.