Reviewing THE CRYSTAL STOPPER—a Public Domain Reprints book

In my post about the Espresso book machine, I mentioned a non-profit organization called Public Domain Reprints and promised to review the book I had ordered as soon as it arrived.

As it happens, I actually have not read The Crystal Stopper in quite a while, so the review will not focus on the story within it (though it is worth mentioning that it is an excellent and suspenseful tale of high adventure with French literature’s best-known master thief). What interests me is the construction and presentation of the book itself.

Finding the Book

The ordering process starts by going to Public Domain Reprints’s website and searching on the book or author you want to reprint. The search process is a bit…problematic. It’s an embedded search, powered by Google, and searches both the Internet Archive and Google Books to find the result.

Each result is presented with a bold blue link to the work itself, and a "Request a Reprint" link below it. At the bottom is a list of pages of results, as well as a "More Results" link.

The problem is, the search doesn’t work very well. First of all, it is fairly inaccurate. I typed in "Maurice Leblanc" both with and without quotation marks and found a whole lot of books unrelated to what I was looking for.

Second, the links are confusing. If I click on the big bold blue link for the book I want, I expect to be taken to a page where I can order it. Instead, I get the book itself on Google Books (or presumably the Internet Archive, though I did not find any results there). I would have to click the smaller, unassuming "Request a Reprint" link below the result to get to the order page. This might be too confusing for unwary users.

Still on the subject of links, the results page numbers at bottom take you to more pages of results in the embedded search—but the "More results" link takes you away from publicdomainreprints.org entirely, to the Google Books search homepage. And while you can certainly find the book you want there, you cannot order a reprint of it from there.

I ended up having to go to the Google Books native search page, do an Advanced Search, and copy the query syntax it generated ("inauthor:Maurice inauthor:Leblanc date:0-1923"), then take that back to the publicdomainreprints.org page to get what I wanted: a list of books by Maurice Leblanc that were out of copyright.

Requesting a Reprint

After you find the book you want and click the "Request a Reprint" link, you may receive two possible screens. If the book you want has already been ordered by someone (as The Crystal Stopper has now) you are taken to an ordering page where you can view a preview PDF of the first one-third of the book as it will look printed, and place your order if it meets with your approval.

If it has not been ordered yet (for example, no one has ordered 813 as of this writing), it will have to be formatted for printing. In this case, you get a reprint request page with a note explaining that it could take up to 72 hours for the reformatting to come through, that requesting the reprint does not obligate you to buy it, and that the quality of scans may vary so you should preview the book before ordering it. There is a space for an email address to get nofication when it is ready, and a reCaptcha to prove that you’re human.

When I requested The Crystal Stopper, it turned out to be 80 hours before the book was ready to order, but close enough.

Placing the Order

When the book is ready to order, it is ordered through print-on-demand provider Lulu.com. The order is placed through Lulu’s website, and Lulu is the one who ships it to you. In my case, The Crystal Stopper cost $10.99—a reasonable price for a printed-on-demand book of its size.

Lulu offers a low cost Media Mail and higher cost Priority Mail shipping option. I chose Media Mail, and had my book within a couple of weeks.

The Book Itself

As pictured above and at left (with one of my cats for size comparison—as you can see, it is about one third of a cat wide), the book is a 6"x9" perfect-bound trade paperback, with green cover and black spine. The first page is a new title page stating the title, author, when the book was originally published, and when it was set up for reprinting. After that are a couple of pages of information about Public Domain Reprints and Google Books. Then the scan of the original book itself begins.

In a nutshell, all Public Domain Reprints really does is take the PDFs of public domain scans from archive.org or Google Books, format them so Lulu can reprint them, and then upload and list them on Lulu. Thus, what you see in this book is pretty much what you would see if you want to the Google Books scan of The Crystal Stopper, just in black-and-white printed form.

This includes a scan of the cloth cover, the University of Michigan Libraries watermark on the flyleaf…and "Digitized by Google" in the lower right corner of every page. It is a pity that it has to be there, but that is Google’s condition for the use of its scans. On the bright side, at least it does not block any of the text from being read.

The result is generally quite readable, at least for The Crystal Stopper. You would never mistake it for anything but a reprint of a scan, even if it were not for the Google logo. There are a few pages where a letter or two is cut off from either edge, and many of the pages have a black line along  the edge where the scanned book’s spine was. In some rare cases, such as the one pictured at right, there is actually a bit of the opposite page stuck on.

That being said, there is only one thing about the book that annoys me. It is a minor annoyance, and I would probably not even notice it once I started reading, but all the same it irritates me. As you can see from the picture, the position of the pages is reversed from how they were in the original book—the page on the left was the page on the right in the original, as it shows traces of a page to the left of it across the original book’s spine.

This means that the page numbers at the top. which were meant to be at the outside corners for easy reference, are instead at the inside and harder to see, and the book does not represent an entirely faithful reproduction of the original. They could have easily remedied this by removing the (pointless) scan of the cloth cover, or even just adding a blank page after the Public Domain Reprints and Google Books blurbs, but I suppose it was not a priority.

Why Exact Reprints At All?

I have to wonder: why bother reprinting the book exactly as it was scanned at all? It is the words of the text that matter to the reader—certainly all the people who read e-books don’t care what the original printed page looked like. A book made by taking the Project Gutenberg HTML version of The Crystal Stopper and formatting it into a printable PDF would look more professional, and could take advantage of the advances in typesetting technology that have come about in the last eighty years.

On the other hand, it is probably less resource-intensive to rescale a PDF that already exists rather than create a whole new one from scratch. If it is only having those PDFs available that makes the project even possible at all, there is no point letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. And I have to admit that the reproduction of the original printed pages does give the book a certain veneer of authenticity.

On the whole, I am not sorry I ordered, and this book will be joining the original Arsène Lupin printings on my bookshelf. It is possible I might even order more eventually, now that I know exactly what I am getting.

Apart from the awkwardness of their search system, I find the process of obtaining a reprint from Public Domain Reprints simple and satisfactory. And if the reprint is clearly a reproduction of a Google Books scan, at least they are honest up front about how it will look and advise previewing before ordering. So, if you need a tree-book of a public domain title that is not in print elsewhere, Public Domain Reprints delivers a decent product at a reasonable price.