foundfreedomEver had the experience of trying to find an out-of-print book and discovering it was only available at premium prices? The experience drives some people to pirate the book they want, since they can’t get it at what they consider a reasonable price. But when author Frank Giovinazzi discovered one of his favorite books was in that situation, he went in the opposite direction.

Giovinazzi found the self-help book How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by two-time Libertarian Presidential candidate Harry Browne was selling at prices of $30 to $100 on eBay and Amazon. Self-help books usually don’t age very well in the used-book market; for this one to be going for so much meant there was a lot of untapped demand for the book. And this gave the Kindle-published Giovinazzi an idea:

I contacted his widow, Pamela Browne, along with her representative and asked them if they held the publishing rights and if they would allow me to issue the book in digital format. They were delighted to have the book issued in this format and we signed a contract – and if sales of this book support it, we are going to go ahead and publish other Harry Browne titles as well. As a point of interest, I have never met or spoken with Mrs. Browne or her rep, everything has been done through email, so here’s another case of the Internet being super awesome.

The book is available for Kindle and Nook, and via Smashwords. Giovinazzi reports that it has been selling well since its March publication, especially considering it hasn’t been marketed beyond Browne’s reputation and Giovinazzi’s own Internet outreach.

The fascinating thing to me is how easy the solution was. Where others might have turned to piracy or been content to complain about the book’s lack of reasonably-priced availability, Giovinazzi took it as an opportunity to see that the book got republished (in a format that doesn’t have the high startup costs of a reprinting, it’s worth adding). Considering how many out-of-print books there are, there must surely be others that could benefit from the same approach.

(Found via eBookNewser.)

1 COMMENT

  1. This is a happy story because the rights situation was clear.

    It’s a less happy story when nobody knows who holds the rights.

    Because, as everyone tells me, treating a book with undeterminable rights status as public domain is a terrible violation of creators’ property rights. (And besides, obviously nobody cares about the book, otherwise we’d know who held the rights.)

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