Re: Online and out of print

Chris Zielinski <chris.zielinski[_at_]alcs.co.uk> wrote:
>
> To start the ball rolling, for an electronic journal, I would imagine
> this could be something like, "The article is deemed to be in print
> during the issue life of this issue of the journal, and out of print
> as soon as the next issue comes out, or in three months whichever is
> the shorter time-span".

This is more like a grant of first serial rights. It would be an abuse of terminology to force that definition on "out of print". Out of print should mean the same thing it does in the print world: currently unavailable with no short-term prospects of once again becoming available.

Also, keep in mind that "out of print" can be a problematic stage to use: in the print world, a book is not out of print when a publisher runs out of copies (that's "out of stock"). A book is out of print when the publisher runs out of copies and decides not to print any more. A book can linger out of stock for quite a while before being declared out of print. Usually an author who has reversion rights at the out of print stage can push the question if the publisher is being unduly slow to declare the book out of print and has no apparent intentions of reprinting, but it's better to provide an explicit time limit after which out of stock becomes out of print.

Yours,
  Michael Bernstein
  Cascadilla Press
  michael[_at_]cascadilla.com Received on Fri Feb 28 1997 - 15:47:12 GMT