Why reprint some of this stuff, which is so out of date? The woprld has moved along so far with some subjects that books like MAA78 need a complete rewrite. Many buyers were not born when that was written and will be confused by what they see on the Net these days compared with the state of knowledge 25 years ago.
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Hi Dave - a fair question, and the answer is : Because we have been asked to reprint it by a number of customers - they want to be able to buy these titles. Whilst some of our titles do miss out on the latest research, that is really unavoidable - we have been publishing books for over 40 years so inevitably some of our books are decades old. As much as we would love to do it, rewriting books is not something which we realistically do - especially with the huge variety of new subjects that we are asked to publish books on. Every month over 1000 different titles are entered into our Books You Would Like To Read section, and if we were to go back and update 1000s of our previous books, we simply wouldn't even be able to consider doing anything new.
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I can quite understand - see Silent Hunter's forum post - that you get regular demands for reprints. However, I think you are in danger of devaluing your product, if you just republish x book only to find that buyers then discover on the Net that it is way off line (I don't know how many times I have said on hte Net that the Austrian 1804 pattern was never issued).
Osprey went through a phase about 8 years ago of churning out Nap books -- the regular buyers were unhappy about how much they were shelling out and the quality control dived (esp. my Elite 101on the Austrian Generals) .
I would be very careful about what you do reprint - the flags could have been dealt with in the McNab book, but with that I am reading regualr comments about material being very out-of-date.
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Does anyone have an idea if the Victorian titles pertaining to the Northwest frontier and Victoria's enemies will be reprinted?
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I have been collecting Osprey titles since 1969 when I was 12 years old (I am now 52). I now have over a thousand titles covering military, aviation, history, and transportation subjects. I support the reprint program since it provides an opportunity to replace copies that have become worn through use or to add titles that one may be missing. In rebuttal to the question about the contents of the titles reprinted, the question of their validity applies equally to sources on the net, and only an Osprey book has illustrations by Angus McBride, Gerry Embelton, Richard Hook, Adam Hook, Mike Chappel, and the other past and current Osprey artists.
Ellis Estes
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I assumed books were re-written. It is a bit dissappointing to find out they are not as a matter of course.
I picked up an Osprey book on the HIP helicopter written in the eightis. The technical information on the helicopter was quite blury as the then WARSAW PACT countries were not forth coming sharing secrets of their military hardware with western capitalist book publishers.
Does this mean in 20 years time Osprey readers will still be none the wiser?
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Hi there – sometimes we publish revised editions of our books but on the whole our reprints are essentially the same as the existing book. Unfortunately we are not able to revise all of our existing titles alongside producing new ones – our back catalogue is simply too extensive and we are working extremely hard to try and get all of our books back into print. Thank you for your comment though, we can look into revising certain books.
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Hello - Is there any way to know in advance when a particular title might be reprinted? I'd love to get a copy of Montcalm's Army, MAA 23. Thank you.
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