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Superior Formatting Publishing

Aerial

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Does anyone know anything about this company? Are they legit? They have a collection of Phillip K. Dick's short stories for sale, but I can't find anything yea or nay about them here on AW.

http://superiorformatting.com

Thanks,

Aerial
 

JulieB

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I'm getting Amazon API errors. I found their stuff on Amazon, and the Phillip K. Dick collection is all public domain short stories. A lot of their stuff looks like that. If you're looking at them as an epublisher, I'd say do it yourself and keep all of the money.

ETA: I don't mean to suggest they're doing anything wrong, but I also don't see links for submissions. Are they even looking for submissions?

And as a consumer, I'm not going to pay for public domain content I can get for free via Gutenberg or Feedbooks. Their web site doesn't fill me with confidence. There should be something there for me as a consumer to see other than a statement and a bunch of Amazon API error statements. Yeah, this may be on Amazon's end, but from a design standpoint they need to be thinking about what happens when that third party content isn't available. There's nothing about who they are.

I'm willing to give them the benefit of a doubt that they're just getting started with their site, but what I see now doesn't fill me with confidence, either from a consumer or writer standpoint.
 
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Aerial

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Thanks. I was looking at them from a consumer standpoint. I don't want to support a non-legitimate outfit.

Aerial
 

aliceshortcake

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I get the impression that they only publish classic works in the public domain.
 

triceretops

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I thought public domain was qualified as 70 years after the author's death, and in which there was no controlling estate. I might be wrong, but I do know that PKD has not been dead for 70 years. Also, difficult to say if his writings qualify as classic, but rather very popular in print and film.

Tri
 

JulieB

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I thought public domain was qualified as 70 years after the author's death, and in which there was no controlling estate. I might be wrong, but I do know that PKD has not been dead for 70 years. Also, difficult to say if his writings qualify as classic, but rather very popular in print and film.

That's from the latest revisions of the law.* A significant number of works were apparently not renewed 28 years after publication because the author or their estates didn't know or think to do it.

This link may be of help. (It's the National Library of Medicine.) From that page:

Works published with a copyright notice or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office in the U.S. from and including 1923 through 1963 are now in the public domain, unless copyright was renewed at the U.S. Copyright Office, in which case they are protected for 95 years from the copyright or publication date.

*I am not a lawyer, and I don't play one on TV. Alan Shore can come sit on my patio any time. ;-)
 

IceCreamEmpress

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Yep, what JulieB said.

This isn't a publisher, it's a content harvester.

And their much vaunted "expertise" is somewhat belied by the number of broken links on their front page.
 

CaoPaux

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Gone. Don't think they recovered from the '12 War and Peace snafu. (HuffPo article). Their explanation remained on their home page until the site went down (cache).