What the hell are EMER’s ? (by Peter Laidler)

[David TS]

Brian
The L1A1 EMERS turned up today safe and sound, thanks very much.

Rest assured I WON'T be running off copies. I used to manage a music band and feel strongly against pirating.

[Brian Dick]

David, You're very welcome. Now you can attest to the quality of the reprints. Just to make my point, that's the only copy that sold after my post on the FAL forum last week. Just think every swinging dick, (no relations!), here in the USA is building SLR rifles and they don't buy a copy for their libraries. It's everything you ever wanted to know about the SLR too, (or maybe didn't want to know, lol!). I still have EMERS for the L1A1, L7A1/A2, Sterling SMG, (both L2A3 and L34A1), and Browning Hi-power. Get them while you can.

Peter, I never knew the L2A3 user handbooks went to Africa. Interesting.

[Peter Laidler]

Ah Brian..........., some things are best left unsaid

[bouletbill]

To my mind, if a rare book is reprinted, then it is no longer rare and although original copies may (or may not) maintain their value, who wants to collect copies of unlimited reprints. Very often even signed & numbered short run reprints will take a generation to attain any value. I suspect that many book collectors are not much interested in the content (like non shooting gun collectors) and those who seek technical information will be satisfied by the cheapest source.
Just a thought ... if you are reprinting 'user handbooks', do you have to pay any sort of royalty ? if not, are you any different to the guy with a home copier who will copy your copy ? If you make yours leather bound and gold embossed then you have to be sure of your market.

Devil's advocate .

[Roger Payne]

Peter, Brian, et al,
I agree. In fact it doesn't just stop with printed material. As many forummers know over the last twenty years or so I have been periodically getting small production runs of rare British WW1/WW2 sniper scope mounts made for the serious collector market worldwide. I have spent all of my adult life combing the planet for rare rings, bases etc for a variety of different British & Commonwealth sniping systems based on 303 rifles. Going back a few years a pair of well known UK dealers bought examples of my PPCo., Aldis-Purdey, & A5 Whitehead mounts. I even fixed the pair of them up with tea/coffee & a sandwich, advice etc., on their several journeys up to my place..................you guessed it, only to find out that they'd just bought them to get patterns so that they could go into production themselves. It's not illegal, but it stinks. I don't begrudge anyone capitalising on a good idea, but I just wish they'd had their own good idea instead of pinching mine. Having said that they've not come up with anything yet, so far as I am aware, but each time I see one of them I'm told 'they're on the way!'
ATB

PS. Sorry if I've gone off at a bit of a tangent from EMERS, but the parallels are so there!

[Peter Laidler]

Food for thought there DRP.

[TonyE]

I have considerable sympathy for Brian and Peter, and also think that the problem of the expectations of some people that the internet generates will increase as time passes.

About a year ago in response to a particular question I posted a quite good humoured rant on another forum about people who were not prepared to do the slightest amount of research themselves but expected others to provide the answers for free. I pointed out that I had spent forty years and much money travelling all over Europe and the US acquiring the limited knowledge I have and that it was not unreasonable to recover a little by publishing books for sale rather than for free on the internet. Little did I realise what I would unleash!

I had a succession of excoriating mails with comments such as "what do you want us to do, grovel?" and "the internet is a free resource for all and you should provide the information" etc. Such is the expectation of many people today that they have a right to other peoples work.

It was all rather brought home yesterday when I discovered that a certain police force was using a pirate copy of something I published many years ago!

I try to give fairly detailed answers to posts on this forum and several others as some of you will know, but there are limits.

Regards
TonyE

[Simon P]

I collect Phamphlets, manuals & old Parker Hale catalogues etc., prefer to obtain originals where possible, but settle for good first generation copies as a substitute. Digital copies are the very last resort for me.

List of EMERs for the Signals, some good descriptions: EMERs - A Valuable Resource