Dates of Print-on-Demand books
I was thinking about the fact that once Print-on-Demand books printed after their original year of production enter the second-hand market, print dates will be misleading. Now that quite serious books (such as John Ball's A Treatise of the Covenant of Grace
) are being printed by Print-on-Demand methods, this seems worth thinking about. The front and back of the title page in our book are part of the original PDF and will not change from year to year. And the last page, with a Lightning Source reference number and a bar code, doesn't mention a printing date.
One wonders whether Lightning Source have thought about this. Could they introduce a print date to the back page?
You might say - "Why does it matter? - surely later printings will be identical in every way so it doesn't matter in what year a particular copy was actually printed." Well, there may well be small changes as time goes on, such as the quality of paper used by the printer, the type of coating used on the cover, etc.
An earlier publisher whose dates were misleading was Moody Press. Its small paperbacks often had only a copyright date in the 1950s or early 60s, when the book might obviously have been printed in the late 1960s or 1970s. However these small paperbacks, printed on cheap paper, were perhaps thought of as mass-distribution items, like evangelistic tracts in a sense, rather than something for which there would be a second-hand market in the future. And of course there were Pickering and Inglis, and the Religious Tract Society (perhaps both with similar publishing motivations to Moody), who often didn't print any date at all in their books.
