Quote:
Originally Posted by DaleDe
When a publisher releases a book there is a finite number of books published (unless it is on demand). A second run of the book would have a new publish date and may include typo fixes. Typo fixes do not constitute a change big enough to re-copyright the book. That is done with a new edition.
Dale
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I perceive that thou art a publisher, or at least a printer. Glad to have your expertise available in this forum.
I have no experience in publishing, but I have owned two small used bookstores in the past. My perception, about publishers of dead-tree books, is that there is, of course, an initial printing ("run"). If sales are so good that it appears that demand will outstrip the supply from the first printing, the publisher will order a second printing. Sales may be so poor from the first run, however, that the publisher will sell the unsold books to one or more liquidators, however. And, of course, the publisher will do no more printings of the book, unless something very unusual happens to warrant it.
However, if there is a second, and maybe other subsequent printings, none of them will be considered new
editions, unless, as I inferred from what you said, there are more changes to the books than minor things like corrections of typos.
Often, I've seen on one of the first pages of a used book (it seems like this was more common in older books, than ones published in modern times), a long list of printings, along with the dates of those printings. For example, "First Printing, 1923; Second Printing, 1930; Third Printing, 1932," and so on. I think that that system may have been completely, or almost completely, replaced by a different system, of which the following is an example:
1234567890123
23242526272829303132
If memory serves me correctly, the last number, "3," on the first line would indicate the printing number: the third. The last two numbers, "32," of the second line would indicate the year of that printing: 1932. (BTW--When I closed my second used book business, there were still a handful of publishers which stubbornly refused to use that system and, instead, used their own proprietary system). If there was more than one edition, it would still be written out to that effect, e.g., "First Edition, 1923." Unless perhaps the publisher is expecting there to be more than one edition, though, I
think that any mention of the book being the first edition usually is omitted; if it is a second or subsequent edition, that fact definitely
will be mentioned.
Oh, and I've read that what it means when a book is said to be "out of print" is that there are no more copies in the publisher's warehouse. It does not mean that a copy--even a new copy--is not available somewhere. It certainly might be available from a liquidator's store or, if nowhere else, on the used book market.
Now back to the different dates on the
Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ book and ebook that we were initially talking about, I will just have to defer to your knowledge about that. I had been
assuming that, since the advent of ebooks, different publication dates were analagous to different
editions, with their requisite changes in the content, to some extent, not just change in minor things, like correction of typos.
I got out of the used book business just before ebooks started taking off in popularity (I wish that I could say that it was because of my insight, intuition, perceptiveness, etc., but it wasn't. It was more like kismet or serendipity. ha. At any rate, the
new dead-tree book publishers were the ones which suffered the most). Anyway, a lot has already faded from my memory. Please
do show my ignorance on any of the things that I said above, shoot holes in it, whatever--I genuinely appreciate it when people correct me, because it will keep me from appearing stupid the next time that I talk to someone about the matter.
