Corpora: Out-of-print Corpus Linguistics books

[ramesh at clg.bham.ac.uk]

Dear colleagues,
I have been trying to obtain some books on Corpus Linguistics for
a colleague in India. One book is out of print, and the publisher
has confirmed that no reprint is contemplated:
> Aarts, J. and Meijs, W. (eds) (1984) Corpus Linguistics.
> Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Does anyone have a spare copy?
Please let me know, and I will put you in touch with the
colleague who wants it.

However, I wonder whether this raises a more general issue
for our young and rapidly growing discipline:
as colleagues new to the discipline join us in many different
parts of the world, and want to catch up on the background
literature, what are they to do if books are unavailable?
How do other disciplines cope with this?
Is there a system for making out-of-print books more available?
Should we think about providing such a system?

I am currently engaged in helping to re-issue a major early
work by one leading corpus linguist, and have recently heard
about another early work that had very limited circulation when
it was first published, and that the author, another leading
linguist, would like to re-issue.

If anyone has any ideas or suggestions for the maintenance and
propagation of the background literature for Corpus Linguistics,
I would be very interested to hear from them.

Best wishes
Ramesh

Ramesh Krishnamurthy
Honorary Research Fellow, Centre for Corpus Linguistics, University of Birmingham
Honorary Research Fellow, Computational Linguistics Group, University of Wolverhampton
Consultant, Cobuild and Bank of English Corpus, Collins Dictionaries