I've noticed a few books from years past that are getting new releases with a publisher change to Gallery Books from the previous sub publisher of Pocket Books. I'm pretty sure that Pocket is still being used as a publisher so I'm curious if anyone has any insight on why they're changing this up? https://www.amazon.com/Star-Trek-Next-Generation-Q/dp/1982160357/ https://www.amazon.com/Captains-Blood-Star-William-Shatner/dp/1982159928/ https://www.amazon.com/Ex-Machina-Star-Trek-Original/dp/1982159944/
Based on the price points listed for two of them (Q&A doesn't have a price listed), these likely are/will be print on-demand editions.
Pocket and Gallery are the same thing. They were once separate divisions of Simon & Schuster, but they were merged under a single editorial and production staff about a decade ago under the Gallery name, and since then "Pocket" has simply been the imprint Gallery used for its mass-market paperbacks. Since these re-releases are apparently trade paperbacks (I'd assume print-on-demand), they get the Gallery label instead.
Ohhh! Nice. An "Ex Machina" in trade PB, to go between TMP 40th anniversary reprint and the new "The Higher Frontier"?
The sizing on amazon is confusing a bit, one of them is 5x8 but the other two are impossible dimensions, like 0.2 x 0.5 I look forward to seeing them out in the wild!
Exactly. They're just different imprints of Simon & Schuster. It's the same editors, staff, etc. Just different labels on the spine. "Pocket Books" refers to mass-market paperbacks, though, so the "Gallery" label is a better fit these days.
If they really are PoD as speculated, then you probably won't see one unless you specifically order one.
If these are print on demand books, the spines might still say Pocket Books, since other POD’s I’ve seen are just scans of older mass market copies and scaled up to trade paperback size (which also leads to a softer picture and blurrier text).
I'm glad I already got the e-book version of Q & A, and Ex Machina, because their prices always go up to match the POD books.
My local bookshop in Sydney has sometimes ordered a few in, ie. a few spares for the shelf after a special order. These trades sometimes end up in my "pull-list" since they know I buy "all Star Trek books".
On the subject of print on demand books... Yesterday I received a copy of the DS9 omnibus Twist of Faith (a replacement for the one I foolishly traded in many years ago after getting my Kindle) from Amazon UK. It looks exactly the same as the copy I bought back in '07, Pocket logo on the spine, US barcode on the back, etc... but just inside the back cover... Unless I'm misremembering, pretty sure that wasn't there on my old 07 copy. I've seen that on a couple of other US published books that I've ordered through Amazon UK in the last few years, but never on a Trek book before. I also ordered two titles from the same era - the Constellations and Mere Anarchy anthologies - which didn't feature this, and Twist took 2 days longer to arrive even though it was on the same order. Looking around I'm now seeing a handful other Trek books with 'Available to ship in 1-2 days' next to them, similar to Twist, which makes me wonder if they're also print on demand titles; some are similar 'anthology-size' books, but there's a few MMPBs at twice the RRP too...
I think at this point any paper book that's more that a couple years old that you can get new from somewhere like Amazon, is probably going to be print on demand.
I got all three volumes of The Worlds of Deep Space 9 together and wondered why volumes 1 and 2 were MMPBS and volume 3 was a TPB. Just checked and volume 3 has printed at the back ‘Printed in the UK by Amazon’. So that explains it.