George Orwell classic expected to fetch several thousand dollars at auction

Buyers Beware
(from Bookcollector Newsletter #232)

Ruth Allen writes - I have recently discovered that a Print On Demand (POD) ‘publisher’ in the US is offering a 26-page ‘book’ called Novels by Elsie J. Oxenham: Abbey Connectors, Abbey Series, Oxenham Non-Connectors (Study Guide) (ISBN:1156856264) for about $15.00 or the local currency equivalent. This appears to be directly copied from four articles on Wikipedia that are largely my work, and that I put on there for free internet use. When I ‘signed up’ to the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), that Wikipedia writers agree to abide by, I did not envisage my altruism stretching so far as other people making a profit from it.

It seems that this firm, Books LLC, offer other POD ‘Study Guides’ – which one is forced to conclude may themselves be ‘lifted’ from Wikipedia or other free sources.
So along with all the other reasons to be wary of POD titles, comes the fact that people may be being inveigled into parting with their cash for something that is freely available on line.

Ruth Allen
Bufo Books (Ruth Allen & Peter Hubbard)
Tel: +44 (0) 1794 517149

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George Orwell classic expected to fetch several thousand dollars at auction

A rare first edition of George Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four has been discovered at the bottom of a bin. The 1949 British hardback was found at the bottom of pile of 200 books in a charity donation bin in the town of Wollongong, Australia.

Although the dust-jacket is a little tattered, its red dust cover is still intact. Paul Hol, a volunteer for charity Lifeline, found the book when he was sorting through the pile of donations.

The novel was one of 66,000 books donated and Lifeline said it could not identify where it had come from. The proceeds from the sale will go to the charity.

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Thanks to BP Books of Christchurch NZ for the red dust jacket image.