If you are at all familiar with BookFinder.com you probably know all about our annual BookFinder.com Report which tracks the demand of the 100 most sought-after titles which are no longer in print in the United States. The list differs from year to year as trends change and books get republished (Indie publishers take note, there may be a hidden gem in the list for you.) This list is no different as number of titles from last year’s report have been republished in the past twelve months including The Sixteenth Round: from Number 1 Contender to #45472 by Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, Old Southern Apples by Creighton Lee Calhoun and Aran Knitting by Alice Starmore, leaving room for some new additions.
In fact Alice Starmore, a superstar in the knitting world, took her own spot on the list. Aran Knitting lived on the BookFinder.com report for years before getting re-published in 2010 and now another one of her works, Tudor Roses, has jumped onto the list to take its place. Tudor Roses is interesting because it includes a number of sweater designs inspired by the Tudor royals (eg. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I) and their over-the-top gold embroidery, velvet, jewels and lace.
Current events also have an impact on the list. In A Payroll to Meet, David Whitford discusses the incidents surrounding Southern Methodist University's (SMU) receiving the "death penalty" from the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA); which involves banning the school from competing in a sport for a year or more (two in SMU's case). This book has been out-of-print since 1989 but scandal in college football has never been more in vogue. The recent rash of cheating, bribing and recruitment scandals to hit Ohio State, Southern Cal, Auburn, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, LSU, and the Hurricanes in Miami have renewed the interest in the grandfather of college football scandal. I somehow doubt this book will see reprint but it’s always interesting to well researched books jump back into the spotlight because of current events.
View all 100 books in the 2011 BookFinder.com Report
Not sure if any of you read the advertorial op-ed column in the New York Times last week where Google Technology President Sergey Brin voiced his thoughts on the Google books campaign but one sentence really irked me.
Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one
choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to
find it in the stacks.
He cannot possibly believe that? All you have to do is type "Out-of-print books" into his own service and see AbeBooks, Alibris, Amazon, Biblio, BookFinder, etc offering more OOP options that you could shake a virtual stick at. The rest of the article reads like a cheap advertorial.
I'm not even versed enough in the whole Google Books rights controversy to say whether i'm for or against it (note: book lunch with Charlie, learn more) but this essay is trash.
[Now Reading: Our Man in Havana by Grahame Greene]
So now that the BookFinder.com report has been available online for a few weeks, I wanted to mention a few of the interesting books which we were forced to cut from the list. By this I don't mean all of the thousands of in print books but rather books which nearly made the cut, I mentioned one such book in a post way back when I first started researching this years Report but there were many more.
One example is Dead in Dixie by Charlaine Harris which is technically out-of-print however after a short discussion we decided to leave this one off the list. You see the book is an omnibus edition of the first three novels in Harris' Sookie Stackhouse series. All three books are still available and a boxed set as well as individual editions so we decided that Dead in Dixie failed to qualify.
Perhaps more interesting was The Essential Woodworker by Robert Wearing. This book was last published in 1998 and is most definitely out-of-print, but was only ever printed in England. So even though buyers in the US are eagerly looking for this book, and there are no new copies being printed, technically, we could not include in the list as it has never been in print in the United States.
The title which I was the most displeased with having to leave off the 2009 BookFinder.com report was Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: the story of Irena Sendler by Anna Mieszkowska. This would have been our number one Biography however this book was also never printed in the US.
The book details the work of Sendler who was a social worker who served in the Polish Underground during the German occupation and saved 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto. Copies are very hard to track down and at the time of writing this post there are no copies available on BookFinder.com. If you like you can keep checking back here, but unless we see a reprinting I would not hold my breath
Outside of the great story within what made this book so interesting was that despite the fact it had never been printed in the US it was adapted into a "Hallmark Hall of Fame production", titled The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler and broadcast on CBS April 19, 2009. With that kind of press and huge search volume, I think a publisher could do well with a North American reprinting.
We have released the 2009 edition of the BookFinder.com Report.
The Report tracks the most sought-after out-of-print books in America, breaking down demand for popular out-of-print titles in ten different genre categories.
As usual this edition features a number of books with very interesting stories:
There are many more so go ahead and read the whole 2009 BookFinder.com Report
Also if any of you are interested I will be on CBC Radio One tomorrow (September 17th) on the All Points West program between 3:30-4:00pm PST. I will be talking to Jo-Ann Roberts about the BookFinder.com Report. If you like you can listen online here.
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