Monday 7 May 2012

Nabu Press - an Elusive Entity

The word Nabu can have many meanings - a German conservation group, an Assyrian and Babylonian god of wisdom, a children`s clothing company or, and this is the one that interests us today, Nabu Press, a print-on-demand historical reprint publisher.

Nabu allegedly publish around 600,000 titles using POD technology. Of particular interest to me is the fact that their titles include works by Mary White Ovington and George Padmore.

Having found a UK bookseller offering their reprint of Ovington`s The Walls Came Tumbling Down, I placed my order and sat back happily to await it`s arrival.

On taking receipt of the book I was a little surprised to see the publication that arrived was rather more slender than expected, and that the cover illustration had no obvious connection with the subject matter.

On opening the book I was even more surprised to find that the text inside was not Ovington`s personal account of the founding of the NAACP, but an antiquarian work by a German academic, written in German.

I don`t expect to have any problems returning the book but I was curious to find out more. A quick skim around the internet showed that a number of people have had problems with this company`s output. Worryingly, Nabu have no website and their publications provide no contact details.

I did find a useful article `Who and Where are Nabu Press` at http://wiki.answers.com which tells you the name of the company that owns them and the address of their registered agent.

I understand that a number of people are experiencing problems with POD reprint companies and that the problem is not confined to Nabu alone by any means.  Presuming you place your order through a reputable book dealer you should have no problem getting a refund if you have a similar experience.

I can see a very valuable role to be played by reprint companies - POD companies if necessary, by all means -   making affordable copies of books like Ovington`s available. Unfortunately, that doesn`t seem to be what`s happening.

If anyone else wants to use the comments facility to tell the world about their experience of these companies - good  as well as bad, if that`s been your experience - I`d be very happy for you to do that.

4 comments:

  1. I bought a book from barnes and nobles in july 2012 the publisher was Nabu press- the book title was El Diablo en Palacio written in Spanish by Ramon Ortega y Frias around 1857_ historical story...at the end of the book we are told End od the First Part... we cannot find the second part any where can anybody help us fi the end of this story we want to buy the second part asap... if you can help/please call joe diaz or suzanne reid at 732 9 273522 or 941 6619263 or
    Email us at joedisuz@gmail.com. or at oconnorrealty.new@gmail.com. thank you very much!!!!

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  2. Nabu Press are pirating a book of mine that I published in 2008. I have had no success in having it removed from Amazon. I'm not going to link to the pirated version, but it falsely states "This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923". I have every right to sue.

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  3. I think that, in this day and age, a company, like Nabu Press, that doesn't have a web-site, and has no published contact address or e-mail, cannot be considered a reputable company. In the one (pre-1923) Nabu Press book that I bought (Feb. 2016), the only mention of the company is a 2-paragraph text asking the reader to excuse "occasional imperfections" that may have been introduced by the scanning process. I have already discovered a missing page: is the reader / purchaser supposed to excuse that also, in a book that cost $40 ?!?

    ReplyDelete
  4. I think that, in this day and age, a company, like Nabu Press, that doesn't have a web-site, and has no published contact address or e-mail, cannot be considered a reputable company. In the one (pre-1923) Nabu Press book that I bought (Feb. 2016), the only mention of the company is a 2-paragraph text asking the reader to excuse "occasional imperfections" that may have been introduced by the scanning process. I have already discovered a missing page: is the reader / purchaser supposed to excuse that also, in a book that cost $40 ?!?

    ReplyDelete