I was shopping online recently for a copy of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Cranford, about which I’ll be writing more later, when I stumbled into a phenomenon that, up until then, I had been aware of but hadn’t had to navigate myself: online knockoffs of classic novels.
The word “knockoff” maybe isn’t quite right in this situation, since I’m talking specifically about novels in the public domain. (As of 2023, that includes any book originally published in 1927 or earlier.) There’s nothing illegal happening here. Anyone who wants to lay out the text of a book in the public domain, print it up, and sell it is perfectly within their rights to do so. Therein lies the problem.
I rarely purchase a brand new copy of any classic novel. My husband and I were both English majors in college, so our house is already packed full of them, but even if we don’t already have what I want, when it comes to classics, I tend to pick up a used copy somewhere. This time, however, we wanted two nice, new copies of Cranford for a pop-up book club discussion with some friends. Preferably, we wanted paperbacks.
I started at Barnes & Noble online, hoping that Cranford would already be in stock at my local store. A copy wasn’t available for pickup, but I went ahead and ordered two Penguin Classics paperbacks, which they’d ship for free. Nice perq. But be forewarned that the date available may change after purchase. Not a good look, B&N! The books, it turned out, would arrive too late for our discussion. Annoyed, we canceled the order.
My next stop—which is sometimes my first stop—was the online book shopping site bookshop.org, which sends a portion of profits to your independent bookstore of choice without asking them to handle the inventory or the shipping—a win for the indie trying to compete with Amazon. Bookshop listed over 1,000 results for the search “Cranford Elizabeth Gaskell,” which seemed odd. Gaskell is well-known, but she’s not Jane Austen. I started skimming through the selections and immediately noticed some fishy covers.
Cranford takes place in the first half of the 19th century in an unpretentious small town in England, but on these covers there were women in the drawing rooms of manor homes, women in late-Victorian bustles and ruffles and bows, and a woman who looked like a 1930s starlet. (Incidentally, there also weren’t thousands of choices. After about 20, the search broke down to the author “Elizabeth Crawford,” and so on—not a big deal, though 1,000 was a significant overstatement.)
These covers were my first red flag. I dug deeper to check the publisher of each edition and was astonished to find that almost every one of them was published by CreateSpace.
Founded in 2000 and now part of an Amazon publishing program called KDP (for Kindle Direct Publishing), CreateSpace “publishes books containing any content at all, other than just placeholder text,” says its Wikipedia entry. (It no longer has a website of its own.) CreateSpace “neither edits nor verifies. Books are printed on demand, meaning each volume is produced in response to an actual purchase on Amazon.” Essentially, it’s a self-publishing platform, but not only for an author’s own books. Anyone could use CreateSpace to slap together a copy of a novel in the public domain and sell it online. With absolutely no quality control, when you purchase a classic book published on CreateSpace, you may or may not be getting a legitimate, accurate version of the text.
To make matters even trickier, you may have to dig to find out that CreateSpace was used because the entrepreneurs selling these books make up fancy names for themselves, many of which sound like legitimate publishers you just might have heard of before.
So, what should you watch for when purchasing a book in the public domain online?
Purchase only copies published by the so-called Big Five publishers and their imprints, well-known scholarly imprints like Oxford and Norton, or a store imprint like Barnes & Noble classics.
For e-books, look to legitimate sources like Project Gutenberg. Be especially careful with other sources! Illegitimate e-books can carry malware.
Choose an edition that includes an introduction or critical analysis by a scholar with credentials from an academic institution.
Watch out for “annotated” editions, which may sound academic but could simply include some random reader’s notes. And read the product descriptions carefully because some copies are merely synopses of the full text. Finally, as noted above…
Avoid editions with covers that don’t seem related to the book or its time period.
I feel compelled to add that if a book is not in the public domain, please do not read it from any site that has pirated material from the author. These sites proliferate online, offering “free books.” Sometimes this means the author is trying to get you to try something new by offering their work for free, but many of these sites are simply stealing content, and the author isn’t getting paid. It’s hard enough to make a living as a writer without your work being sold out from under you. If you can’t make a living, you can’t keep writing books for the people who want to read them.
In the end of our search for Cranford, we purchased two hardcover copies from Barnes & Noble. We just couldn’t find a legitimately published paperback volume on time. The hardcovers, part of the Penguin Classics series published by Penguin Random House, one of the Big Five, came with a nostalgic botanical design on their cloth covers and a sewn-in ribbon for a bookmark. They were in stock at our local B&N, and we picked them up that afternoon, giving us plenty of time to sit back, relax, and read.
I'll share Standard Ebooks - https://standardebooks.org/. They are a volunteer-funded project focused on getting Project Gutenberg source material and crafting better edited ebooks out of them. Highly recommend them for readers who like the Project but find that sometimes their files might not be well-suited to their e-readers.
That Penguin Clothbound for Cranford has a beautiful design! Admittedly, I'm not fan of them because the pattern illustration is very fragile and deteriorates over time. I'm finding that for classics, I've become a fan of the black spine Penguin paperbacks and Norton Critical Editions. I have yet to get an edition of the Oxford World's Classics to compare. For Penguin paperbacks, another tip I can give readers is to look up in Penguin USA or UK websites for the ISBN of the edition you want and then look for the book through the ISBN (BookFinder, Abebooks, Amazon, all major booksellers will allow you to insert the ISBN in the search feature).
Thanks for the reminder about Cranford. Have you watched the 2007-2010 BBC series based on the book that’s available through Amazon Prime? There are three seasons. It features many famous British actors, including some that subsequently were in Downton Abbey (Judy Dench, Eileen Atkins, Imelda Staunton, etc)—many faces you would recognize. After we finished the sublimely touching season one we subscribed to PBS in order to watch the three episodes of season two. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen. I think it would be a treat for your (or any) book group.