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Let's also remember that there are a lot of backlist books: Publishers generally only concentrate on a few titles in a month, whereas they may have thousands of backlisted titles to go through; they simply don't have the manpower to do the job, which is why they subcontract it out as much as they can.
But you can't expect a subcontracting system of scan-and-OCR to be able to go through more than a half-dozen to a dozen books in a month, with any quality.
Any way you do it, you're going to see a huge bottleneck in getting backlist books published as ebooks. Maybe, someday, a radical method of allowing readers/peers to join the process, and speed up certain aspects of it, will happen. But the present publishing process simply won't allow for it.
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