So where do I get old books to put back into print?

The first thing you need to understand about putting old books back into print is that you don't need to actually own any old books to do it. There are websites containing photographed old book pages which have already been converted into text using optical character recognition. Anyone who wants to can download this text and the page images and turn them into a print-ready book using the techniques I have described.

One of the best is the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/. They have 33 million books in their collection, most of them in the public domain.

A newer effort to do much the same thing is Google Books at https://books.google.com.

Books from either of these sources will require hand correcting text. OCR does a surprisingly good job of turning printed book pages into plain text, but it isn't perfect. You may also have to deal with errors in the original text. I publish a number of Hindu scriptures which were translated to English but printed in India in the late eighteen hundreds. Proofreaders who were fluent in English may have been in short supply back then, because the published texts contained thousands of errors in spelling and punctuation.

What I generally do is to create a donation to Project Gutenberg, which publishes free e-books for books old enough to be in the public domain. Project Gutenberg has volunteers called "whitewashers" (a reference to Tom Sawyer) who examine my donations for errors that I missed using automated tools. I run these same tools against my own donations and correct the errors that they find, but I have yet to submit a donation where the whitewasher did not find errors I missed. Sometimes they find so many it is embarrassing.

However, the texts that finally make it into Project Gutenberg are of very high quality. Any one of them could be turned into a print on demand book with very little effort.

There are some unscrupulous persons who take free e-books from Project Gutenberg and sell them on amazon.com. Selling print on demand titles, where I have spent many hours turning the raw text and images of the e-book into something you would be proud to have on your bookshelf is one thing. Taking someone else's work and selling it is quite another.

The page I look at in the PG website most often is this one:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/sear...

This page shows the latest titles to be added to the site. If you check this out every week or so you will be quite impressed with the variety of books being transcribed and donated. Of course they have all the classics, but that is only the beginning of what you'll find there.

The last source of old books is used book stores, library sales, and eBay. These will of course be actual printed books. How can you put these back into print? Well, it turns out I have written a book on the subject for the One Laptop Per Child project, which you can read for free here:

https://archive.org/details/EBookEnli...