Talk:Out of print

Publishing question
Questin. In standard terms in the publishing industry when is somehting in or out of print. For example I heard an interview with Kurt Vonegut once, where he said that he never would have imagined himself at 70 and 'completely in print'. So what does that mean? Clearly not all of his books were in the process of being printed at that moment, or probably even that year. So how recently does something have to be printed to be 'in print'?


 * I assume that in print in this case means that all of his books were readily available, not necessarily rolling off the press at that exact moment, but that you could walk into your local bookstore and reasonibly expect to find any and all of his books there.
 * 66.31.76.221 (talk) 18:46, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

Regarding merging
Merging the more narrow topic out-of-print book to here is a viable option, but I don't feel any great need to do that. Merging in the other direction is a nonstarter, in my view.

Someone removed a lot of the content from this article (see this older version) on the rationale that there was no citation to a reliable source for that. Most or all of that just strikes me as common sense, and I have no reason to dispute it. I'll point out that the only citations in out-of-print book are to lists of the most sought after out-of-print books (content which is not actually included in our article), so that article is similarly lacking a citation to a source supporting the content (other than the last paragraph discussing Madonna's highly-sought out-of-print book). wbm1058 (talk) 23:15, 11 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Closed, given the lack of support. Klbrain (talk) 21:03, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

Proposed merge of Out-of-print book into Out of print
Out of print should be a broad-concept article including all this content. User:力 (power~enwiki, π,  ν ) 21:40, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Support. I stumbled upon this article, and was very surprised to see that it's basically empty. I actually expected it to be something like the Out-of-print book article. I don't see why this article couldn't incorporate all of the other article's content. It would serve readers to have this merged. twsabin 00:50, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Major Edits Made
Paragraph concerning books becoming out of print had no references cited to explain why/how a book goes out of print. It only contained a general understanding of a book going out of print. I added paragraphs detailing how a book goes out of print, how this definition has changed over time, and how this affects authors.

Citations include Author's Alliance guide completed by a contracted law office on rights reversions for authors, a New York Times article interviewing authors, agents, and publishing companies, and a legal website describing reversion rights clauses.

This gives a more comprehensive, factual insight into books going out of print in today's publishing world. Librarian92 (talk) 15:24, 4 July 2023 (UTC)


 * The legal website was a lawyer blog - law firms set these up as a type of marketing, attempting to use SEO to gather search results as a means of gaining business. Such sites do not meet Wikipedia's sourcing requirements and should not be used. - MrOllie (talk) 15:44, 4 July 2023 (UTC)