Talk:Kessinger Publishing

OR paragraph removedd

The paragraph below was removed because it is not cited with references and appears to be Original Research WP:OR. If reliable sources are found that confirm this copy it can be re-inserted.

• "A large number of their re-prints do not include adequate publication information for the original that has been reprinted, which is particularly problematic when dealing with translations, since the reader has no idea which translation has been reproduced. A case in point is their edition of Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit (not to be confused with their reprint of Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind, which is a different translation of the same book, Die Phänomenologie des Geistes), for which they provide no translator credit whatsoever. This lack makes it difficult to trace the provenance of the text, find out more about the translator's work and qualifications, or even cite the text conscientiously. Their editions are evidently machine-scanned and involve little or no human editorial finishing; proofreading, layout, and other functions ordinarily considered part of the task of the publisher do not seem to occur in Kessinger editions."--Kbob (talk) 14:18, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

This article is very poor and highly misleading historically and factually. It gives no history of Kessinger Publishing, only trying to subsume it in the context of a much more recent phenomenon, Google Books, which only began to get underway in 2005 after being announced in 2004. At this stage, Kessinger Publishing already offered tens of thousands of reprints, many of them self-scanned, and none of them available for download on the Internet. I know a bookseller who was approached by Roger Kessinger expressing interest in the purchase of a 54-volume set of early 20th century occult periodicals priced at $18,500 in the mid-2000s. Clearly Kessinger were buying antiquarian books and scanning them themselves before selling the reprints for profit, long before Google Books even existed. Because Google Books has sought to comprehensively scan, they will have listed most or all of the titles that were already offered by Kessinger. It might be that Kessinger has since used Google Books scans as a direct source for further reprints, but this was not the foundation of its business.

The article also contains weasel words, with this sentence being particularly bad: "Rumors exist as to whether what Kessinger is doing is moral, and for the common good. Others wonder who is gaining the advantage by reprinting books that were available free to download"

Morality as perceived by unnamed individuals (without references to their words on the Internet) is irrelevant to a Wikipedia entry of any kind. Businesses by their nature are interested in making money and not in the common good in any case. Let's keep Wikipedia to the facts. This article as it stands needs almost entirely culling and reworking based on verifiable and historically accurate information about the company.Philip Graves (talk) 08:37, 13 May 2011 (UTC)