My question is, at least on the surface, a fairly simple one. A colleague and I had a conversation a few days ago, and essentially he wants to get in to the publishing business - he would provide funds to set up a new publishing company, with press et al.
Now the weak link in all of this is that he doesn’t have anything to print. Another friend of ours was hoping to write a travel book, and the financier was willing to form a press simply for that.
What I’m asking is whether there would be sufficient call for classical texts in the original languages. I realise the percentage of people fluent in Greek/Latin is tiny, but even a tiny proportion of the world’s population forms a substantial customer base, and obviously universities may be interested in set texts rather than snippets in textbooks or printed e-books.
This is all entirely speculative at the minute, of course, but if there were printed copies of the texts in the original Greek or Latin, perhaps with an introduction & notes by an academic editor, would you buy them?
(I’m about to play harsh devil’s advocate here; I’d love for there to be more publishing houses putting out Gk and L texts, but here are some of the matters you’ll have to think about.)
Yes. And I do.
There are currently two main houses doing this, Oxford University Press and Teubner (formerly; now a wholly owned subsidiary or somesuch of Saur) in Germany. For the dual-language texts, there is Loeb for English, and the Budé series for French.
The Oxford and Teuber texts are scholarly. My Iliad from Teubner has about the top 1/2 to 3/4 of the page the Iliad text, and the rest is the critical apparatus which lets me know what all the different manuscripts and papyri say; plus citations of quotes of the text from other ancient authors. The Oxfords are the same, but with a generally more modest apparatus (as are most Teubners).
The Loeb and Budé texts have much less apparatus; the left page is Greek or Latin, the right a translation.
For the most part only scholars and geeks like me are going to buy a Teubner or an OCT (Oxford Classical Text). They are not going to seem friendly to beginners. Lots of people buy the dual-language texts; sometimes the Teubner will be $95 compared to a $20 Loeb of the same author.
For me most of the time (and I suspect for most members of Textkit) I need a student edition of a text, which has not only the author’s work (perhaps only a subset of it), but it will have a large section of notes on tricky bits if grammar, history, vocabulary or dialect. These obviously take more work to do. And again, there are several houses publishing these already (the Cambridge green-n-yellows; Bolchazy-Carducci, etc).
So, I think you have a lot of competition. We are simply not in a period in history when an uncommented Gk or L text without apparatus is going to appeal to more than a very small handful indeed.
The OCT business has never made money (I’ve heard), and the brisk sales of hymnals subsidized the series. The hymnal business is no longer what it used to be, so there aren’t as many modernized OCTs as we might like, and I must be honest, the printing quality of both OCTs and Teubners has gone to utter crap. My 1950s editions of OCTs are more legible than modern, photo-offset printings. If you could produce a good critical text that didn’t have sucky printing I’d be happy to buy my texts from you.
I agree that there’s probably no real money to be made in classical originals, but…
I was in my university’s bookshop a few months ago, looking for a translation of Beowulf. They appeared to have four different translations on the shelf; so I picked up the one that most caught my eye. I was going to read the first few paragraphs of each one, and then pick the best.
The book I picked up was a glossy paperback, with a photo of an Anglo-Saxon helmet on the cover. However, when I looked inside it, I found the original Old-English, with half a page of footnotes.
There was nothing sub-standard about that book. Just as importantly, there was a stack of them (15 or so). A stack that, I noticed, changed height from time to time.
I doubt that many people study classical languages at Melbourne University (even fewer would study Old-English). The emphasis in Australian education is on practical courses. Most people who study humanities only do so because they couldn’t get into anything “better”. Those sorts of people won’t usually take the hard option of studying languages.
So someone has printed a quality edition a Beowulf (I didn’t look at the name of the publisher), and they have found a retailer. They may well have forced the traditional publishers of Beowulf out of the market by offering a better product. (Whether this Beowulf publisher is making a profit, though, is the question.)
So, it appears that it can be done. But, it would be a bit of a risk. If the OCT is really making a loss on these things, then it will probably happily surrender the market to your colleague, James. But, does he really want it?
The thing is, Beowulf is the classic Anglo-Saxon text, and people are interested in it because of that. A similar situation might occur with Homer’s Iliad, Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid- but there’s no way that you could establish a successful publishing firm on three texts alone.
And it’s important to remember that most original classical texts are on the internet. So you’d have to 1) Offer something more than these ‘free’ editions and 2) Promote it heavily to universities and specialist book services. This would mean sending out lots of free copies to the people who decide which editions of books to order. Otherwise you might have an extremely good product, but it’ll just get lost amongst the ‘established’ brands.
Sorry to put a dampner on your original question, but I really can’t see any way you could (realistically) make a profit on selling original texts. There really isn’t the demand- I’ve even seen latin versions of Harry Potter at ‘reduced to clear’ prices, because people simply don’t want to buy a text they can’t read.
Why not consider electronic publication i.e. like helping here at Textkit by adding to the content?
I’m sure that there are many people here and elsewhere who would love to have a clean, well formatted text version of the various texts that they could download and print. An electronic version of the various grammars and readers has often been a request.
Two points here:
First, as a business venture it would be worthwhile as you would have to become familiar with the entire process of publication. There is more to publishers than the printed page.
Second, although I’m not sure of it, I would think that the cost involved in setting up a web based site and the tools would be substantially less than that of a full blown publishing house.
Lastly, I’m not speaking for Textkit or Jeff, but I would think that this type of addition would be mutually beneficial if even for a short term.