for the first time i bought one of those scanned, newly-bound, paperback versions of a long out o’ print book (here, anabasis 1-4, goodwin/hadley), the ones that warn of scanning errors up front. it arrived today.
the ads suggest that they are coming from somewhere out of india (?), but the volume itself is remarkably free of modern information. it seems impossible to tell who did it (although there is a rather charming accidental (or was it?) picture of the scanner’s index and middle fingers, with what appears to be one of those finger condoms on the index). it says it was printed in the us, but that’s about it. for reasons unknown (expense?), the spine is blank, which i suppose will make it easier to find on the shelf.
it has a decent heft to it. cheap glue binding, but the book opens well and lies flat. my impression is that the binding will hold if the book is treated gently. the greek text is large and easy to read (the paper is a bit glossy; haven’t tested it for reading yet). only one page of the greek text was badly scanned, but that is easily solved. the scanner appears to have missed some pages from the introduction, but I’m not certain how many. hopefully not too much. the rest of volume (notes, dictionary) appear free from defect, but i didn’t look at every page.
so, at least to this point, a pretty positive experience (price was between $20-25 US). the alternatives were really old hardbound copies that I figured would have their own various issues. it’s a nifty volume (with one of those great dictionaries with illustrations!). best to all!
I have a few of these, which came through in satisfactory condition: one volume of Bétant’s Lexicon Thucydideum, and a volume of Aristides.
Grab a PDF off of Google Books or archive.org and make your own through lulu.com. It will be fairly cheap, and you can guarantee your own quality.
That’s basically what the reprinters online do. They find the PDFs online and Print-On-Demand them for you (often at high prices).
The only real difficulty is that Google’s book pdfs are all vector formats, and it takes some knowledge to transform them to raster format in a space-efficient way using imagemagick, assuming that you want to edit them somehow (removing the Google Books page, for example). I’ll post some instructions when I have some time.
hi jeidsath,
thanks for the thoughtful reply. although any real comprehension ceased with the word “vector,” i am interested in learning how to manipulate a pdf (or other file type) to get ag works to print with wide spaces between the lines to facilitate note taking and analysis. is that kind of thing doable?
You can’t add double-spacing to a document unless it’s in a digital format. OCR is not good enough yet. But if you have a Google Books PDF, you can do something like this once you install imagemagick:
convert -monitor -verbose -density 300 accentuationgree00chanuoft.pdf +dither -colors 2 -type bilevel -resize 1771x3021! -compress Zip -quality 100 output.pdf
The output from a command like that will be good enough to upload. Proper use of imagemagick is a big topic and not one that I’ve invested enough time to be very knowledgable about: https://www.imagemagick.org/
interesting, and thanks! i tried the IT folks where i work and you’re the first to mention imagemagick. i will look into it.