Adam,
That is great news! Thank you.

ChrisL

So, um, was the article any good?

...and how much of the $20 made it across to Maxim? Would he be better off selling copies directly or via the articles equivalent of Myfonts.com?

> how much of the $20 made it across to Maxim?

Good question.

hhp

I doubt any single cent. But if Typography Papers issue 1 were ever reprinted, I doubt Maxim would get additional renumeration.

Actually, it ended up being a bit more than $20. Precisely speaking, it was 15 GBP. That included a 5 GBP "copyright fee" and a 10 GBP handling fee. I don't know what the British Library does with the 5 GBP copyright fee but my guess is that it goes to the collective copyright organizations.

Anyway, since this electronic document delivery mechanism is offered by the British Library, I presume that it's legal and OK with the copyright. If anybody doesn't like the UK copyright system, he's free to submit a petition to the British parliament

But I doubt it would ever be changed. The libraries in most European countries allow copying of articles and even entire books -- but it's usually a paid and not very cheap service. In German copyright law, sharing single copies with people I know is also legal (an equivalent of the "fair use").

No matter how loud an author may cry -- if something is published, the author does not have absolute and complete control over all copies of his work. Continental copyright provides very strong protection but also provides a balance between the consumer's and the author's rights. The service of the British Library seems to fit into this balance. It's comparatively expensive (a few pages per BL delivery costs as much as the entire copy of the publication in print) but for out-of-print publications such as the Typography Papers issue 1, services like that are often the only way to get a copy.

Adam

> I doubt Maxim would get additional renumeration.

Si and Adam, I much appreciate your caring about me. It is a fact though, that for my piece in Typography Papers 1 I was not paid. But I have no problem with that. In fact, I feel proud that my essay had been included in the first issue of this truly remarkable series. I am a big fan, and a devoted reader, of Typography Papers.

Thanks for the explanation. I'm sure it's all legal, but It would be wonderful if out-of-print type development related material could be made available in a way that compensated the authors and original publishers directly.

Cheers, Si

That would sure make sense. I wonder if the publisher of the series, Reading University Press, would be interested in distributing such out-of-print-but-still-in-demand materials. Hope they would not lose money on that. And, inshallah, they could distribute better-quality PDFs�searchable, &c.

Given the short print runs on most design books in general and all typography books in particular, I've often wondered if there was a valid business model to re-print these titles.

As I have said in the other thread on Maxim's article, TP1 was typeset in 95 on a conventional film-based workflow. To produce PDF deliverables from ten-year old source files is not trivial. We are a small Department and all [overworked] staff have substantial commitments, so this is not the highest priority. I am sure there may be ways to resource and manage such a project, but I can't see anybody's agenda lightening significantly in the next couple of years. I agree wholeheartedly it would be beneficial to a good number of people, and I would like nothing more than contributors to make some money out of their IP, but I just don't see it happening anytime soon for the early TP content.

I'f it's any consolation, later issues have been produced on a CTP-based PDF workflow.

What about brute-forcing it with hi-res scanning? Plus there's always OCR. And you could still make a PDF, and even put it on CD* and sell it. And if you're short of manpower to do that, you could outsource the job (maybe even including [one-off] replication and delivery), and give a cut of the sales as payment, maybe with a small upfront payment too and/or a free perpetual subscription, hopefully including back issues... (Yes, this is all a big, fat hint. :-)

* BTW, I recently got a nice gift: a CD of the book "Front Page" (a collection of LA Times front pages spanning 1881-2003), which is basically a 262Mb PDF of scans, but it also includes [the visible part of] one article from each cover as a actual text. All with a simple VB interface - nicely done.

hhp

I think Hrant is onto something there. Someone might even want to do it for free � (Heh heh.)