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DaGaffer

Down With That Sorta Thing
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Good news everyone! booktrade.info - Book Trade Announcements - Gollancz announces SF Gateway

press release said:
Gollancz announces SF Gateway

Posted at 3:28PM Wednesday 20 Jul 2011
Gollancz, the SF and Fantasy imprint of the Orion Publishing Group, announces the launch of the world's largest digital SFF library, the SF Gateway, which will make thousands of out-of-print titles by classic genre authors available as eBooks.

Building on the remarkable success of Gollancz's Masterworks series, the SF Gateway will launch this Autumn with more than a thousand titles by close to a hundred authors. It will build to 3,000 titles by the end of 2012, and 5,000 or more by 2014. Gollancz's Digital Publisher Darren Nash, who joined the company in September 2010 to spearhead the project said, "The Masterworks series has been extraordinarily successful in republishing one or two key titles by a wide range of authors, but most of those authors had long careers in which they wrote dozens of novels which had fallen out of print. It seemed to us that eBooks would offer the ideal way to make them available again. This realization was the starting point for the SF Gateway." Wherever possible, the SF Gateway will offer the complete backlist of the authors included.

That'll be my Kindle loaded up come Autumn.
 

Zenith.UK

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It won't be free as in beer.

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Pricing? TBA closer to launch so that we can be sure we're in line with prevailing market trend, but competitive & value for money.
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Formats? The usual. SF Gateway eBooks will be available through all the usual retail channels. Whatever you're reading on now will be fine.

Looking at the list of authors, I can see a number that are clearly out of copyright and so in the public domain. It makes me think that this is an attempt to cash in on orphaned works that are freely available from other sources online.
Olaf Stapledon for example. "Odd John" was written in 1935 and Olaf died in 1950... therefore out of copyright and a public domain work.
 

Calaen

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It won't be free as in beer.

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Looking at the list of authors, I can see a number that are clearly out of copyright and so in the public domain. It makes me think that this is an attempt to cash in on orphaned works that are freely available from other sources online.
Olaf Stapledon for example. "Odd John" was written in 1935 and Olaf died in 1950... therefore out of copyright and a public domain work.

Yup, charging for works that are free, I imagine they will say they are taking the time to bring it upto date in a format we can get!!!
 

noblok

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Looking at the list of authors, I can see a number that are clearly out of copyright and so in the public domain. It makes me think that this is an attempt to cash in on orphaned works that are freely available from other sources online.
Olaf Stapledon for example. "Odd John" was written in 1935 and Olaf died in 1950... therefore out of copyright and a public domain work.
Don't copyrights last till 70 years after the death of the author? (Wiki)
 

Chilly

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Yes, but if you create a derivative work of an out of copyright work, the new work has it's own copyright. EG if I scan in plates from 100 year old Atlases (maproom.org) I can then sell on the scans (a new work) since I had to do some work and spend spend some money to produce them. The same can be said for re-editing and laying out an out of copyright book to pdf or whatever and selling it on. You are completely free to get the source materiall (if you can find it...) and do it yourself.
 

Zarjazz

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Just the fact you can download a lot of those out-of-print works that would be very hard to find or purchase otherwise, I wouldn't mind paying a few quid in that situation.
 

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