Scans are great, but to me nothing will ever replace the feeling of a physical book. For a long time, I've thought about making my own reprints with something like Amazon's print on demand service, Createspace. I'm not talking about something that I'd sell commercially (although I have thought about, planned, and done some work along those lines at different times), rather I'm thinking of just some one copy only books for myself so that I can have paper copies of some of my favorite PD Golden Age books to read whenever I want. Things that nobody else is selling commercially, like Nedor/Better/Standard material to start with. Amazon seems to have a pretty decent price for something like that. I could print myself a 500 page paperback book for $35.85. That's completely in line with the MSRP and page count of Marvel's Epic line. Selling it commercially would be much higher, $60 before it would even turn a minuscule profit on Amazon, and it would lose money in their expanded distribution. That just seems a little high for a paperback, and profits would be too slim to deal with the hassles of setting up a small business, so I'm just looking at this as a personal project right now. Additionally, with such a large page count, properly restoring each page, which I'd want to do for a commercial endeavor, would take forever. I plan to do just a few simple Photoshop actions to make the pages look nice enough to read (i.e. make colors pop and remove most yellowing), put it in Adobe InDesign, make a table of contents, a cover, and send it off to print. Nothing too fancy. Ideally, I could do one every few months or so. Just whenever I felt the need/desire. Fox, Ace, and Quality volumes are also high on my list if all goes well with this initial book.
Does anyone have experience with Amazon's POD service? Is the quality good enough that this would be a worthwhile effort? I know that there are POD GA reprints for sale there, but as I said, the markup is just too high for me to want to try them. Plus, from what I've seen, absolutely no restoration work at all has gone into them. I'd rather save my money for my own books that will meet my own standards.
All that said, my next step is to pick out stories to put into my Nedor book. Superheroes (including Supermouse) are priority, but I'm open to just about anything from the company. Black Terror and Pyroman are my favorites, and I imagine I'll have plenty of them. I have a few stories in mind, but I don't want a book with all material that I've read, nor do I want to just pick things at random, so I'm asking for opinions. What, if any, Nedor stories have stuck out in your mind as particularly good or unusual, either from a story standpoint, or artistically? Depending on their length, I can probably get 40 or so stories in a 500 page book, so the more suggestions, the better. I'm wanting to stay away from anything fiche just because it doesn't look too good to start with, but if there is a really good story with a fiche fill page or two, that would be OK.
-Eric
