At the Distributed Proofreaders forums, Greg Weeks announced this week that all the books of science fiction author H. Beam Piper that he knows to be in the public domain (mostly pre-1964 works) are now either being processed through pgdp.net or published at Project Gutenberg.
The Distributed Proofreaders define “closing the set” as the activity of publishing public domain books that are mentioned in other, already published public domain books; but anyone who has ever played the game, knows that there is more than one way to construct a set, so I am appropriating the term to mean “all the books of one author (that are legal to publish)”.
Wikipedia describes the end of Beam Piper’s life as tragic; the story goes that in November 1964 he committed suicide over “the mistaken perception that his career was floundering (his agent had died without notifying him of multiple sales)”. After his death, the rights were bought by Jim Baen at Ace Books (later acquired by Penguin) where they promptly forgot to renew the copyrights (which was then obligatory in the US).
Yea for forgetfulness? One might argue that the lack of reprints, and the lowly quality of those that do appear are precisely the result of the disappearance of a stake holder (read: copyright owner). That and more was discussed in an interesting thread on the Usenet “newsgroup” rec.arts.sf.written last August, oddly titled “H Beam Piper legal problems?”.
this is great — i’ve loved h. beam piper ever since i was a kid. i’m amazed that he’s so unknown, even among my friends who are real science fiction buffs.
What is even neater is that manybooks.net offers a download in a custom.html format. Using this and ebboktechnologies Beta OSX tools I can make new books for my REB1200, including the excellent covers that manybooks includes. WOW !
do tell, howard! i’m on a mac, and i’d love to know what you’re using to do this — from software to hardware.
http://www.bookdesigner.org/wordpress/
(one of ?) the best converter not only for reb 1200….
for PC-s