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Originally Posted by zerospinboson
It can't be that the books are that expensive to stock, so why not offer them?
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But it can. Niche market books are always more expensive than mainstream ones, and niche market books that the general public can't tell apart from public domain ones are hard to sell.
The average reader (that's me) has limited interest in classics, and no awareness of the differences between translations. (I know there's differences. I don't know what they are, or whose are better, nor do I care, for the most part.)
So offering a specific, modern translation alongside an older, public domain translation generally means the modern one won't sell, and is a waste of bandwidth. (Or the modern one sells--and then customers complain because they didn't see the cheaper one. Bad business, that.) It may not be worth the hassle of tracking down the copyright on the modern translation & trying to convince the owner to allow it to be placed in ebook format.
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Does anyone have a clue why the selection of these kinds of titles at most stores is so limited? Is it really that everyone who frequents MR only reads fantasy/scifi/horror/whatever other genre applies, or is this assumed by evil Them?
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Ebook readers are still a niche market, one that's dominated by techie geeks. Techie geeks are prone to fantasy/scifi/horror genres. Also, f/sf/h ebooks were being distributed online in text format for years before there were ebook readers, so the market for those genres was known to exist.
While the readers are getting a more mainstream foothold, they're being marketed to the "businessperson on vacation" crowd--again, not strong readers of classical literature.
Ebook devices have not yet been seriously marketed to the academic crowd. The iLiad tries, I believe, but is too expensive... but it'll take a good PDF reader with annotation support to get anywhere in that market. Once there's a good, relatively cheap (under $500, preferably under $400), 9"+ screen with annotated/bookmarked PDF support,
then you'll start seeing more diversity in classic literature, textbooks and useful manuals in ebook formats. (Most of 'em will be PDFs. But with a reader that has a 9" screen and perhaps native ability to remove whitespace, that should be at least tolerable.)