For Publisher of 9/11 Report, a Royalty-Free Windfall

Re:question
Hold on. The Government Printing Office has printed its own paperback version of the report. It’s also selling it, for $8.50–but if you want it mailed, it winds up costing a little more than the commercial paperback. If you live in DC, you can walk into the GPO bookstore and buy the GPO version for less than the commercial paperback.

They’ve also released it as a series of PDFs, for those who want all or part of it “for free” (of course, at typical paper and toner prices you’ll spend more than the cost of the paperback in printing it out…)

I question whether GPO made a sweetheart deal (as Greg seems to imply) with one publisher, and would love to see evidence of that. I suspect the files were put up as PDF as soon as they were ready, and that the publisher had the rapid-print systems to get it out and distributed.

I don’t think it’s at all clear that the GPO would have made windfall profits by mass-producing the report and putting it in bookstores, quite apart from the howls of pain that would raise about unfair competition from a government-subsidized company. The GPO isn’t set up to distribute to thousands of bookstores on a rapid basis, and may not be set up to handle the deep discounts and returns policy needed for such distribution.

I just don’t think there’s a conspiracy or controversy here. The GPO did what the GPO was supposed to do. A publisher with fast turnaround did what publishers are supposed to do. The fact that the source material is public domain is a good thing. There should be more public domain material for smart publishers (and others) to exploit. But that’s another discussion.

Not that anyone’s still reading this, but…
The Sunday SF Chronicle had a half-page story about the 9/11 publication, which clarifies some points:

There are indeed separate Norton and GPO editions. (There’s also a partial edition with commentary, which came out in June, from another publisher.)

The Norton deal was the winning bid, not a sweetheart deal; returns no profit to Norton (according to the story, any profits after cost recovery will go to charity); and was based on their ability to get the book printed and out to the stores on an extremely tight schedule: The PDFs were finalized on Saturday, the books were available on Thursday–and were in thousands of bookstores by noon EDT on Thursday. For a 560-page book with 600K-copy first run, that’s pretty impressive, and something GPO couldn’t do.

(Of course, real credit for getting this done so fast goes to Donnelly, the printers, and UPS, the delivery people; Norton put the whole thing together.)

Looks to me like a good example of public-private cooperation. And, of course, with public-domain PDFs already available, anyone can also print their own copy “for free” (if you can print 560 pages for less than $10!).