Book Depository opens US site
By Paul Biba
Well, they sell pbooks, but they also use digital printing methods to reprint out of print books, a real service to the book community, so I thought I should mention this new development. Here are a couple of things from their “About” page. Their US home page is here:
Currently, The Book Depository is able to ship 1.8 million unique titles, within 48 hours, from our fulfillment centre in Gloucester, United Kingdom. This figure is increasing everyday. Apart from publishers, distributors and wholesalers, we even list and supply books from other retailers! Amazingly, we are also able to arrange the reprint of over 300,000 out of print titles which, again, we can dispatch from Gloucester within 48 hours. …
We are not in competition with Amazon, we complement Amazon by providing books which have poor availability, offering considerable discounts on certain titles which Amazon are unable to. On the other hand, we recognize that our customers want books quickly and, so, if we do not have stock — or if Amazon is considerably cheaper — our customers are able to order direct from Amazon via a link from our website. …
Of the 30 million titles ever printed in the English language only about 2.2 million are in print. We are seeking to make available as many of these titles as possible (and working to do the same with foreign language titles). This way, we will have the largest breadth of titles available in the world. Where books are no longer in print or poorly available we are seeking to make them available again by republishing. We do this through our Dodo Press imprint.
We have an ambitious publishing programme planning to reissue and digitize as many out of print books that are in the public domain as possible. At present, we are publishing 200 new titles every week and hope to increase this to 400 per week over the next few months. This means we will be allowing book-lovers to be able to obtain 20,000 titles a year that previously were unavailable.
July 28th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Thank you for this! I hadn’t even thought of checking the Book Depository for a pd book I could not find anywhere - but find it I did.
Already ordered…
I know there’s a lot of resistence to e-books, but I don’t care about the format. There’s the old real estate slogan of ‘location, location, location’, well, for me and books, it’s ‘content, content, content’.
Though I feel obligated to add just how much I’m enjoying carrying around dozens of Google pd books AND PDF articles AND any other content I care to sent to my Kindle DX. Do I wish the above book I ordered was available as an ebook? Yes, I do. But I’m also happy to have it in any form, so no complaints.