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Reviving Literary Gems as Ebooks – Digital Publishing with Patrick Mehr of Plunkett Lake Press

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Visit Patrick’s Publishing Website: plunkettlakepress.com

Guest Profile

Patrick Mehr is the founder of Plunkett Lake Press, a digital publishing firm that specializes in converting rare, forgotten, and interesting non-fiction books into eBooks. Born and educated in Paris, France, Patrick graduated from École Polytechnique and Mines Paris – PSL. Patrick left behind Frech technocracy and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1982, becoming a management consultant, serving the semiconductor industry and others. He worked at Boston Consulting Group before starting his own consulting practice.  Patrick became a publisher in retirement. At the time of airing, Plunkett Lake Press has 340 titles.

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Episode Highlights

Background and Origin

Patrick started Plunkett Lake Press as a hobby in his retirement. His wife, an author herself, prompted his initial foray into eBook publishing when she received an offer from Amazon to digitize her works. Leveraging his expertise in both technology and research, Patrick has since expanded his catalog to include a diverse range of non-fiction works.

The Need for Digitizing Rare Books

Patrick explains that old, rare books often don’t get digitized because “conventional publishers do not see any economic value in turning a book that’s, moreover, out of print, into an eBook.” This is where Plunkett Lake Press steps in.

The Intricate Process of Digitization

Patrick’s process involves physically scanning each book, followed by rigorous proofreading to correct any errors that the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) might introduce. A significant part of his job is to ensure that the digital version is as accurate, if not more so, than the physical copies. He used a text-to-speech tool to read aloud every word and piece of punctuation as he reads along in the print copy (when there is a “,” it will read it aloud as “comma”).

Challenges with Rights and Publishers

One of the significant challenges in Patrick’s journey is acquiring the electronic rights for the books. “Finding the estate of an author whose last name is not uncommon and then finding, in the case of translators, finding where they are and or if they are deceased, who their estate is, also very daunting,” he explains.

Additionally, major publishers sometimes refuse to relinquish electronic rights even if they have no plans to digitize the book, which frustrates Patrick. “My point being that these companies have backlists of tens of thousands of books to digitize, and it’s frankly not economical for them to do It. I do it basically as a hobby, so to me, it doesn’t matter.”

“When I ask them for the E-rights… some major publishers will say, ‘Oh, we never license rights because it’s too complicated.’ And I then have to locate the estate of the author, which requires quite a bit of research. Especially if the author’s last name is Fortier, as you would know.”

Making Books Affordable

One of the main satisfactions Patrick derives from his work is making these rare and often expensive books available for $9.99. “A used book that would cost hundreds of dollars for no good reason… all of a sudden is available for 9.99. So I feel that’s a huge service.”

Getting Involved

For those interested in suggesting titles for digitization, Patrick encourages visiting the Plunkett Lake Press website. Suggestions from readers are invaluable, often leading to exciting new additions to their growing catalog.

Patrick Mehr’s dedication to bringing obscure, intelligent books into the digital realm is both inspiring and essential for preserving literary history. His meticulous process and passion for non-fiction ensure that Plunkett Lake Press will continue to offer invaluable resources for readers worldwide.

If you’re interested in diving into some of these rare finds, check out Plunkett Lake Press and perhaps even suggest a title yourself! Patrick’s incredible journey is a testament to the importance of preserving and making accessible the wisdom of past generations.

Transcript

Introduction

Justin Fortier: Hello and thanks for opening up the toolkit. I’m Justin Fortier, the host. Today I’m talking with Patrick Mehr, the publisher at Plunkett Lake Press. Now, he started as a digital publisher in his retirement where he takes old interesting books and makes Kindle versions out of them. Also distributes on the other platforms as he’ll explain.

I ended up finding him when I was looking for a copy of this book about manufacturing called “From the American System to Mass Production”, and realized that the first time I had looked to buy this book, there’s no Kindle, and then one was added. And I was wondering why a book published so long ago had finally capitulated and brought their ebook online.

And sure enough, I saw a note about his publishing firm. Before that, he was a consultant. He’ll touch on his background there, but if this is your first time listening to my podcast, The Toolkit, you can find us on all podcast platforms, hopefully, and YouTube at The Toolkit. And I really just interview people that I find interesting. Without further ado, let’s get to the interview.

Interview

Justin Fortier: All right. Thank you, Patrick for joining. I appreciate you taking the time to do this today. I actually came across you with this book written by David Hounshell, a Carnegie Mellon professor that had written a book from the American system to mass production, and it used to not be on Kindle. And then within the last year it was on Kindle. Then I checked out the publisher cause there was a note, an author’s note at the beginning, talking about the digital reprint. And I went to your site and I saw you did it for a whole bunch of old books that looked really interesting to me. And so I wondered who’s doing this. One of my favorite things to do online is to go to a site called archive.org or go into like newspapers.com and look at old things. But that’s not as easy to do as going to Amazon and clicking buy. I’d love to talk to with you about Digital Publishing and how you got into this.

Patrick Mehr: Excellent. I’m glad I’m here because I hope you will recommend to me many other books like the David Hounshell that are not yet available as e-books that should become e-books. And assuming you have similar interests to mine, then they might become, if I can get the electronic rights from whoever now controls them, they might, just like the David Hounshell book, also become Plunkett Lake Press eBooks and be available on Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, Google Play, Kobo and Nook, which are the five distribution channels that I use.

So to give you a little bit of background, I was born, grew up and was educated in France. I went to basically the equivalent of MIT there and did a lot of mathematics, physics, et cetera. And then as often happens in France for people who are good at calculus, they end up being technocrats in the government, as opposed to inventing the next Google, unfortunately. And so that’s what I did. But I always had an interest in industrial issues and science in general and new discoveries, etc. And so I moved to Massachusetts 42 years ago now, where my wife also lives. My wife happens to be an author, quite well known, and she also happens 20 years ago to have posted on Amazon what Amazon at the time called Amazon Shorts, which were up to 5,000 or so word pieces which they made available as PDFs for $1.99 or 2.99 or some small amount of that sort.

And one day my wife received an email from Amazon saying, we’re discontinuing this program, but if you’d like, we can help you turn those things into eBooks. Now, my wife is a bit of the opposite of me, namely, she doesn’t really follow technology nor is she too interested in it. So she immediately forwarded it to me. And even though I was not at the time a great reader, I did follow the technology of eBooks because I thought that’s something interesting. This is literally, I believe now 15 to 20 years ago. And so I looked into what Amazon was proposing to do and I said, gee, I can do that. Why wouldn’t I do this for all of my wife’s short pieces and for her major books, assuming that she had kept the electronic rights. And sure enough, her agents had been smart enough over time to indeed retain the electronic rights.

And so that’s how I started Plunkett Lake Press, frankly, as a hobby, because that was just about the time when I stopped working as a management consultant doing strategy for technology based companies. And decided to do this at least for a few titles. That’s also the time when I realized that as a technocrat in France and as a business consultant here in the U.S. working in very obscure fields like semiconductor testing and so forth, I never really had time to read books that interest me. And so one thing led to the next, including several author friends of my wife’s who had written various books of non-fiction. One that comes to mind is a biography of Marie Curie. And so we, I started when I was done with my wife’s books to digitize those books as well. And so Plunkett Lake Press started with five or six titles and now is up to 340.

This is basically an opportunity for me to read very carefully. And if you’re interested, I can explain to you why the very carefully. Books that interest me that have not yet been turned into eBooks by anybody mainly for two reasons. First of all, because they first appeared as physical books well before eBooks existed. And second, because they’re so intelligent and well written that they’re not like your pop stars memoir and do not have a wide market. And therefore, conventional publishers, such as Random House, etc., do not see any economic value in turning a book that’s, moreover, out of print, a backlist title, into an e-book. And so that’s when I get involved.

So that’s what Plunkett Lake Press does. So the focus is really on the areas of interest to me, which are, which is, by the way, strictly non-fiction. There’s no fiction whatsoever on my list. So there are lots of biographies, memoirs, books by and about scientists, or technology, such as the book that caught your attention, and then books about history in the United States, European countries. Books about Jews because I happen to be Jewish. And so that’s pretty much it.

Justin Fortier: I was amazed to find your work because it’s something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit. I’m currently also a management consultant. Slightly less niche, but for industrial companies like automotive suppliers and things like that.

Patrick Mehr: We’re getting a Rivian in exactly four days. So

Justin Fortier: Oh yes, a wonderful vehicle. I’ve gotten a chance to ride in a few of them recently and work for some suppliers making some parts there.

Patrick Mehr: If you think its battery works very well, you should know that my older son is the engineering manager on the LFP battery on that vehicle. So

Justin Fortier: Oh, that’s fantastic. We can talk about vehicles as well. Keep going.

Patrick Mehr: It’s part of the job, you’re right. Finding a publisher when a company has been absorbed several times is sometimes challenging. Finding the estate of an author whose last name is not uncommon. And then finding, in the case of translators, finding where they are and or if they are deceased, who their estate is, also very daunting because in the case of translations, one needs to also secure the rights to use that translation for an ebook edition.

Justin Fortier: Interesting. Yeah, that’s, for most of these, they’re, when the book hasn’t been published for a while, I assume, they haven’t been receiving checks for a while. So they’re not really looking out for communication, right? Are they often surprised?

Patrick Mehr: Yes.

Justin Fortier: What’s the reaction?

Patrick Mehr: In several such situations, I have helped the estate of a deceased author recover some money from a publisher who had lost track of that estate. I will say from my experience that I think I’m better at finding estates of deceased authors than even Random House. The reason being that it’s frankly not in Random House’s interest to chase an estate if nobody asked them where are my royalties for XYZ book from my great grandfather, who’s now deceased, of course. Whereas in my case, I have to find the estate, otherwise I can’t publish the ebook.

Conclusion

Justin Fortier: Thank you for making it to the end. And I’m really glad Patrick came on to chat with me. I found it interesting. I think there’s so much opportunity to take old wisdom books and get them into electronic forms, something I’ve been playing around with that I hinted at is turning old books into personal audio books. I don’t spend time to get the rights. So I can’t publish them, but maybe that’s something I’ll do in the future. I think it’s amazing to get a perspective from the past.

As somebody who grew up listening to public radio and audio books and starting to read a lot of first what my grandfather gave me, but then you start to pick up books based on what has the nice cover or what’s in the airport shelf or what’s new in the library. And I’ve really been enjoying just that depth that books in these niches can offer.

So if you’re thinking about reading an old book, I encourage you to go check out archive.org. It’s an amazing set of archived old books. Some of them, if it’s still within copyright, you can just borrow them online for an hour at a time, but if it’s 200 years old, you can just view it. You can download the PDF. It’s been fascinating. I’ve been totally digging into the manufacturing history of Connecticut. And all the innovations that spread out from those early founders and it’s been awesome.

Anyway, thanks for listening. I appreciate it. If you want to find me, I’m @justinpfortier or on X or Twitter, whatever you want to call it. And if you want to find my email, you can go to Toolkit.FM. My website’s a mess right now, but I think there’s some more info there. You can also find old podcast episodes. And reach out. My messages are open.

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