Where do little POD books come from?

For the past few years, I've been looking now and again for Nightshade (1857), a novel by Irish anti-Catholic campaigner William Johnston.  There are a scant few copies in various and sundry research libraries, the closest of them at Boston College, and I've never seen one for sale.  Well, not until now, anyway.  Here we have one of these anonymous-looking POD books of somewhat baffling provenance, sold by what appears to be an e-book club (also with a somewhat anonymous-looking home page).  A number of these POD companies are simply scraping content from GoogleBooks, Project Gutenberg, and even Wikipedia, but Nightshade doesn't exist in full text on any free electronic archive.  So where, I wonder, did the OCR come from? Does GoogleBooks sell otherwise inaccessible content to POD publishers? Are there legions of elves sneaking into research libraries to scan rare books?

ETA: Out of curiousity, I decided to see if I could download the PDF version.  Because they wanted my money, right? Well, no--"Sorry, we can't provide this edition to someone in your country for copyright or other reasons."  Let me see if I understand this correctly: you can't sell me a $9.99 PDF of an OOC book for copyright reasons, but you can sell me a $36+ paperback copy?  How...interesting. 

Comments

[arnold]

My guess is that 'General Books' have just scraped the metadata from a public-domain library catalogue, without actually bothering to check if they can supply the book. But I may be wrong.

Remarkably, Nightshade appears to have gone into two editions, the first of 1857 and a 'new edition, revised' of [1858?] issued in the 'Run and Read Library' with a preface by George Gilfillan. The BL catalogue lists no less than ten works called Nightshade, including Nightshade, or the Masked Robber of Hounslow Heath, a Romance of the Road (1861), which sounds fun, and the slightly worryingly-titled Nightshade and Poppies: Verses of a Country Doctor (1898) which makes one wonder what he put in his cordials.

[Ben Brumfield]

I encountered something similarly shady when I ordered a POD version of a lesser-known work of Kipling's. The book was a re-package of the Project Gutenberg version, without any typesetting. More distressingly, each page contained spam links at the bottom!

I reviewed it in the hopes of warding off other customers, but worry that we're going to see similar things with scam artists and POD.

[Ray Girvan]

OTOH I recommend the British Library's new POD service; I was beginning to despair of finding Maxwell Gray's The Broken Tryst, but suddenly it's in their catalogue. No-frills cover, but very nicely reproduced.

[Zora]

No sooner does Distributed Proofreaders put a new book up at Project Gutenberg than we see it advertised by the POD bottomfeeders.

If you want a deadtree version, you can just do a little formatting on PG's HTML version and send the file to Lulu. I think they charge something like $13. A great improvement on most POD prices.