[FOM] Reprinting the classics

[Roger Bishop Jones]

On Tuesday 09 Oct 2012 17:22, Timothy Y. Chow wrote:
> Sam Sanders wrote:
> > Which other books (e.g. in Math. Logic) should be
> > reprinted, according to the FOM community?
> 
> At one point I tried to find a general solution to this
> question. 

Surely there are solutions now readily available.

Google books scans everything they can get their hands on, 
and makes them as available as is legal, including PDF 
downloads of books which are in the public domain or for 
which permission has been granted by the copyright owner.

Amazon's CreateSpace allows any book for which a PDF is 
available to be printed using Print on Demand technology.
The books can be put on the amazon catalogues for anyone to 
purchase.
Anyone can do this at no cost, CreateSpace and Amazon make 
their money when the book is purchased.

To chose one example mentioned:

Beeson's book on Constructive Mathematics is already on 
Google books.
It can be searched, but you only get to see snippets because 
the book is still in copyright and permission has not been 
given by the copyright holder for more general access.

So the principle obstacle to the re-publication, either 
digitally or in print, of out-of-print titles is simply 
permission of the copyright holder.
Apart from that the technology is there, and companies are 
willing to do it for free.

Roger Jones