Theos-Talk Archives (January 2011 Message tt00056)

Out of print theosophical books - A simple solution

There are many out of print theosophical books which are invaluable to the
student world-wide. The books are out of print because either it is not
viable to reprint it due to very low demand or there are some political or
public reasons not to. So far there was no solution with the traditional
approach to production of books. Digital world and Internet has opened up
immense opportunities and we should not miss it.

Since every organization tries to make a buck from every activity, one
approach can be to make them available on e-readers such as Kindle. There
are two problems with this. Most theosophists are not rich. They do not own
Kindle. Even I do not own one. Secondly I was told that the commercial
outfits which will convert a book to Kindle format is expensive in that they
want upto $1.00 a page. Even print on demand is going to involve pre-print
expense which needs to be recovered and both this cost and production cost
may keep the price of books high for most theosophists. Also, print on
demand is not available world wide.

So doing nothing is not a good policy considering the low public awareness
of theosophy and TS. Some solution need to be found and found now.

Here is my take. If the theosophical publishers allow their out of print
books to be scanned and converted to pdf files, then they can be made
available for download. If this is done, many volunteers around the world
with access to scanners would do the job at no cost to the publisher. This
needs out of the box thinking and it would work like a miracle and within a
short time most of the out of print theosophical books would be available
for everyone.

All this needs is for the movers and shakers take off the business hat and
put on theosophical hat and think through the whole issue. If anyone has a
better idea, I would like to hear about it.

MKR

There is no religion higher than Truth.


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