Essays In Sound was a series of academic publications published during the 1990s and comprised some of the finest writings on sound, contemporary music, performance and philosophy.

There were four editions published between 1992 and 1999, and featured debate and discussions about some of the leading figures in experimental sound and music during the 20th century, including Edgard Varèse, Philip Glass, Diamanda Galás, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and local academics such as Martin Harrison, Philip Brophy, Virginia Madsen, Nicholas Zurbrugg, Fran Dyson, Kaye Mortley and John Conomos.

Edited by Alessio Cavalaro, Shaun Davies, Eddy Jokovich and Annemarie Jonson, the Essays In Sound series made an academic impact and became required texts for many music and audio arts courses around the world. Each edition had a print run of 1,000 copies and the last copy was officially sold in 2001.

Unbeknown to the editors, copies of the publication were surfacing through various out-of-print book stockists around the world and, in some cases, selling for up to $AUD125 per copy. Although the publications were out-of-print and almost 25 years old, the editors decided that it would be historically worthwhile to republish the original editions into one consolidated book, with the added benefit of undercutting the exorbitant prices that were being charged internationally.

Of course, with these publications being so old, there were technological challenges – the digital artwork for the first edition from 1992 has been completely lost, subsequent editions had corrupt image files, and digital files were stored on media formats that had long disappeared (Syquest and Zip drives). In addition, the original layout files were set in QuarkXpress 2.0, which had to be translated to InDesign.

The lost edition was rescanned from an original copy using optical character recognition, and images were rescanned at high resolution and Gaussian smoothed. Using an online print-on-demand service, the book has been re-packaged as a 418-page publication and is now available to purchase through online bookstores, such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Substantial changes in technology have enabled an out-of-print publication to be resurrected, with a continuous and endless print supply, as well as distributed to a world-wide audience. It also enabled the editors to again control the content, as develop a steady stream of revenue from international book sales. And all at virtually no cost.

ARMEDIA has the expertise to put out-of-print publications back into print, taking the publication through the entire production process:

  • bringing the original book back into digital format
  • designing the book in its original format, or designing to a new format
  • propagating the publication to online bookstores, such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble
  • producing in multi-formats (print, or EPUB format for Kindle, Kobo and other e-book formats.

Does your organisation have out-of-print publications that you’d to bring back to life? We can help – email us at info@armedia.net.au.

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