"The Price of eBooks from the 1930s" Topic

My hope, when books started to become available in digital formats, was that many of the out-of-print and hard-to-find books from the 1930s would be available again inexpensively.

However, I'm seeing them at $8 USD a pop. Really?

Are these public domain titles, already available elsewhere like on Gutenberg Project? If so that's a little bit like highway robbery.

Dan

You may be looking in the wrong place. I habitually buy "Megapack" bundles for $0.99 USD chock full of short stories from the era.

have you tried these?

link

Take the Nero Wolfe mysteries, for example. Written by Rex Stout.

Some of these are priced at $8 USD or $13 USD per book for the Kindle. Others are at $1 USD or $2. USD

The Mr. Moto mysteries by Marquand are $8 USD on Kindle.

Gutenberg has one book from each author, but not in the popular series.

Lots of the ebook stuff strikes me as a price rip off. Be thorough is your searches on amazon. I have found the same books available from Amazon ranging in price from $8 USD-10 to free. I only used it once but you might check Open Library openlibrary.org You check out the books as in a real library so you do not get to keep them.

A lot can also depend on the quality of the product – a lot of .pdf 'books' are poor quality scans from a library somewhere – I've found some longer titles to be missing hundreds of pages, only the first 50 or so at each end being present and the rest either blank or totally missing.

If you can put up with fuzzy scans then you should not be paying much or anything. Then you come up with good quality reproductions, either complete, crisp scans that have been properly processed, or even OCR'ed and checked texts which are the best as you can easily reformat them or convert them to other file types – well, you should expect to pay for someone's time and effort as well as amortising their scanner and computer – a quality book scanner can cost in the thousands of dollars range.

Worth looking for DVDs people are putting out of scanned out-of-copyright books – lots of scifi mags out there, though don't know about ones that interest you.

Must try the Nero Wolfe 40minute scrambled egg some day.

As a book nut, I find this conversation a trifle odd.

A hospice store near me has a monthly sale--fill.a box with books for ten bucks. I usually get a mix of hc,trade sc,and mass pbs: 30-40 total.

Once they had a lot of SF and mystery mass pbs I wanted,so I did one whole box. Came out to around 80,IIRC.

At those prices,you can read and toss.