Sadly, Specialty Press is shutting down their aviation publication biz effective right now. This means that the books that were due to come out in 2011… won’t be coming out (unless they find another publisher).
I called them earlier today to confirm that this was true, and sadly it is. The reason is purely economic… the market for aviation books has been in decline for the last decade or more (call it “since the end of the Cold War”), and the current recession has made an even bigger dent.
Here’s what I got from a phone call to the VP of operations:
1) Yes, they are shutting down publishing of their own books. No more new titles.
2) They are in the process of informing the affected authors. The public announcement of this was to occur sometime in the next day or so, but they wanted to talk to the authors first.
3) They are hoping to find new homes for the cancelled titles with other publishers, but the options are few.
4) This is a result of the economy in general and a several-year-long major decline in sales of books in this area in particular. Sales have been so slim that the print runs have been too low to be economically viable.
5) Piracy is *not* considered a major factor… just economics and a change in the demographics. people just aren’t as interested in the aviation topics as they used to be.
6) SP isn’t shutting their doors… they will continue dealing with other publishers. But their own publishing business is, sadly, kaput.
So if you were planning on buying one of their forthcoming books… tough luck. if you were planning on buying one of their current books… do so now, as there probably won’t be any more. And the chances are, they’re not going to get any cheaper when there aren’t any more of them.
Here’s a link to the Amazon search results page for “Specialty Press:”
Specialty Press
And here are some SP books I recommend from personal experience:
AAAARGH. I really wanted volume 2 of that…
Damn, I’ve got a lot of their books.