Maria Goutier-De Smet (1810–1882) was a Flemish pedagogue and writer. She published several books of poetry and prose as well as educational content. Drie Verhalen (Three Stories) is her third publication. As she died more than seventy years ago, her work has already entered into the public domain and was digitized by Google as part of their major digitization campaign cooperating with libraries. Scans available via Google Books have since been a great resource for making business with reeditions, with publishers pulling the PDFs directly from the platform, adding covers and paratext, and selling them as print-on-demand books in completely automated workflows on Amazon or other websites.

The Google Books corpus is also accessible by the Espresso Book Machine network and every EBM can print any book made available by Google in a matter of minutes. This edition of Drie Verhalen was produced by the EBM at The American Book Center in Amsterdam in 2020 and gives a perfect example of the multiple layers of remediation and paratext editing that are taking place in this process. The book uses a cover template that lists The American Book Center as publisher on the front cover. On the back cover, this process is listed in more detail with Google Books being referenced as digitizer and provider of the book content and the Espresso Book Machine as producer of the book. This paratext replaces the scanned front and back covers of the PDF offered by Google.

A note is also added to the first page with yet another Google logo, stating: “This is a reproduction of a library book that was digitized by Google as part of an ongoing effort to preserve the information in books and make it universally accessible.” This note also includes a QR-coded link to the digital version of the text.

The version at hand shows several errors and visual artifacts which are rather common in Google Books due to bad scanning (as also evidenced by Greg Allen’s Wohlgemeynte Gedanken über den Dannemarks-Gesundbrunnen and Benjamin Shaykin’s Special Collection)—including, in this case, an extremely distorted version of the title page. As of 2022, Drie Verhalen is made available in three different scans by Google Books, the scan of the version at hand was either corrected or deleted, with the distorted title page no longer existing in any of them. In this sense, Drie Verhalen exemplifies the book as a stable container for documenting digitization processes and versioning of digital files. It also shows the new role of book producers, who are no longer only generators and providers of content but also seek to find new ways of profiting from freely available content and masking it as publishing.