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Maybe I'm just late to the party, but I wanted to catch up some reading of a couple of black library books I've had on my list for quite some time....and it's almost impossible to get them.

Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I enjoy actually turning pages of a book, so that's what I am looking for, but they are just not available anywhere and the prices on the secondary market are just absolutely idiotic and completely detached from reality in my opinion.

Is this a recent issue? It has been some time (maybe a year) since I last bought a black library book.
Are they pushing towards e-readers and slowly abandoning all hard copies?

Honestly GW has always had a bit of a spotty supply of printed goods. I figure the issue hasn't improved since international shipping and production and all went up in cost.

Some books also sell out like crazy or are produced in low volume and such. BL do tend to do reprints of popular things, but yeah its very much a case of if you want it you really want to be buying it sooner rather than later.


That said get yourself an e-reader and you can at least keep up as they put a LOT of their material into ebook. If you get them off the BL site there isn't even any copy limits so you can read them on any device; or you can get them easily through Amazon Kindle if you get a kindle e-reader

Humble Bundles are always pretty ace. I prefer a real book, but when I'm getting 22 books that are a mix of novels, novellas, and omnibuses for the price of one BL book and the money goes towards charity, I can live with a Kindle.

 Gert wrote:
Humble Bundles are always pretty ace. I prefer a real book, but when I'm getting 22 books that are a mix of novels, novellas, and omnibuses for the price of one BL book and the money goes towards charity, I can live with a Kindle.

I meant to get the last one and forgot before the end date!
But yeah they've done quite a few of them on Humble so its well worth keeping an eye out

 Gert wrote:
Humble Bundles are always pretty ace. I prefer a real book, but when I'm getting 22 books that are a mix of novels, novellas, and omnibuses for the price of one BL book and the money goes towards charity, I can live with a Kindle.

I still love the tactile feel of a book but can handle a Kindle as it allows me to have a lot of material in a small space when I'm spending six months plus away from home. Freakishly though, I don't like reading from a tablet but a Kindle e-reader page is, to me, like a printed page.

 alphaecho wrote:

 Gert wrote:
Humble Bundles are always pretty ace. I prefer a real book, but when I'm getting 22 books that are a mix of novels, novellas, and omnibuses for the price of one BL book and the money goes towards charity, I can live with a Kindle.

I still love the tactive feel of a book but can handle a Kindle as it allows me to have a lot of material in a small space when I'm spending six months plus away from home. Freakishly though, I don't like reading from a tablet but a Kindle e-reader page is, to me, like a printed page.

It's not freaky - the e-ink is really good and yeah its just like reading off a real page. The Paperwite ones are even better as the backlight makes it super easy to read. Honestly a paperwhite kindle is so much easier than a 1000 page novel where not only do your fingers get tired after a while, but where you sometimes have to contort the book around to get the light right.

Of course books tend to be easier in really bright like, but yeah there's a reason even die-hard book fans love kindle (or other) e-ink readers.

I hear ya, but honestly lately I do 90% of my reading on my tablet or phone. I like that they emit light so I don't have to worry about where the lamp is, I like that they weigh less than a hard back and I don't have to worry about creasing pages.

So to answer your question I would say books are heading to where CD and vinyl were 15 years ago, and becoming niche. It's sad, I do love a good book store, and books are much MUCH better for references and browsing, but there you are.

I totally agree when it comes to reference.

I think for digital reference the only way to get close is having a big investment in multiple screens and extensive use of bookmark systems and such.

Books you can also know "where" something is physically in a book whilst for digital you have to rely fully on contents/index and keyword searches and such (and many publications/reader systems only really do page numbers and index/contents)

I do understand BL's desire not to be stuck with unsold stock - that was apparently a non-trivial issue for them five years ago.

But bookshops are telling me they're reducing the amount of BL stock they carry not because it doesn't sell but because there is no print run and it causes customer complaints.

And there are some books (not limited ones) that sell out in a heartbeat and there's clearly a case to do a second run of. Several of the Primarch books regularly go for three figures on eBay - why not do a POD for those?

it's not just limited to BL though, pretty much all publishers of SF (and Fantasy) so substantially smaller print runs than they used to do

and unless your a big name author (with big sales numbers) there is unlikely to be a second print run so if your bookshop doesnt get a delivery, or all of them are damaged by being the books on the top of a box that gets rained on you can very well find you can't get hold of it

it used to be most mid range authors would get a print run a year for the first 3-5 years (especially if they were writing a series when the earlier titles were almost guaranteed a re-print) but not any more

 The Phazer wrote:

And there are some books (not limited ones) that sell out in a heartbeat and there's clearly a case to do a second run of. Several of the Primarch books regularly go for three figures on eBay - why not do a POD for those?

At this stage I think we can safely say that FOMO is the foundation of GW's marketing plans. They like having a fanbase that will log in at all hours to get something before it sells out in 5 minutes (literally!). They like being able to run a leaner operation with less stock on hand and no more bins with just Abaddon's left arm in case someone wants to order it.

They are willing to leave money on the table to have this.

They may also want to steer us towards ebooks, they sell them directly so middle man, expenses are trivial and no stock to maintain.

Interesting conversation. I still haven't bought an e-reader device or a single e-book, but in the case of Black Library, that doesn't mean I've been jumping on overpriced limited print editions either. These days I tend to get BL books as audio books. I've always enjoyed and collected spoken word recordings anyway, not as replacements for reading, but as another form of enjoying books. There are still times when I'd much rather read a printed version on paper, but what can you do? I'm not willing to jump through hoops or pay scalper's prices to do it.

But I'll always appreciate printed books when they can be had reasonably, because they offer something that no internet-connected device can, something that used to be commonplace and ubiquitous when reading, and is now hard to find anywhere: absolute privacy.

I've had a lot of success buying old BL novels from second-hand bookshops online and on ebay. I much prefer physical books as well. I managed to snag alot of the old original early 2000's paperback prints which is the ones I remember from my childhood. Don't get me wrong though, this is always perfect. On ebay especially sellers can wildly overvalue prices of books. I've found this especially common with OOP Horus Heresy books.
And of course being second hand there is always a chance of damage.

When I worked at gw (over a decade ago, so this practice may well have changed) about one Friday each month a list of titles would be sent to stores. Those books where ripped in half and binned to make room for new books coming in (and absolutely never ever went in bags instead and taken home.)

Stores don't have much space dedicated to BL, the back catalogue is huge, and so the warehouse space needed to be able to maintain a physical range wouldn't be profitable enough to make it a viable option. It's frustrating that books vanish without warning, and also that scalpers put absolutely ridiculous prices on out of stock books that no sane person would ever spend. Regular checking on ebay and WOB has filed in most of my gaps. Just takes time.

 JamesY wrote:
When I worked at gw (over a decade ago, so this practice may well have changed) about one Friday each month a list of titles would be sent to stores. Those books where ripped in half and binned to make room for new books coming in (and absolutely never ever went in bags instead and taken home.)

The normal practice in book retailing (in the US, not sure about elsewhere) is ripping paperback covers off and sending those to the publisher for a refund. The coverless book is then returned. Book stores in effect are selling on consignment for the publishers. It's a unique aspect of book retailing not found in other industries. When I worked in publishing we had to look at returns as well as sales.

It's super frustrating - to the point where I'm about to give up on getting any BL novels in the future. I'm stuck 50 some books into the HH series (and have been, for 2+ years now).

So I started buying some other random books/series in the meantime - figured I would check out Gaunt's Ghosts after hearing so much about it. Only to find I was then stuck after the first Omnibus in the Gaunt's Ghosts series.

I picked up a few more books last Christmas - only to find whoops, Ciaphas Cain is a series too. (I wasn't aware that was such a big series). And only the first book of that is available as well.

So now I'm stuck in 3 series. I can see not keeping every book in print all the time. But your flagship series that is finally wrapping up?

Also feel like the omnibi for popular series should also be kept in print. Or at the very least stop suckering people in when they can't finish them.

The problem with Black Library digital books is a lot of the time you're paying print on demand prices for a download, I remember when Double Eagle first came out as an e-book on their site it was $50 to download.