Quote:
Originally Posted by Darqref
Producing backlist books may be harder than it sounds. At Baen, there are lots of books for which it's easy to reprint, but much harder to release electronically. They exist as film, which can be sent to the printers, but must be scanned and OCR'd before electronic copies are available. Baen uses them for filling months with duplicate books, but they have to pay someone to do the scanning.
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Okay, given. But it's not like it's rocket science. Scanning and OCR-checking can be given to interns, farmed out to foreign services (who only have to distinguish an incorrect letter from the original text, whether or not they know what it means), or done by summer help.
Such a job needs 3 people: One to scan; One to do the OCR and checking; and one to check behind them. I think most publishers can handle the cost of 3 interns producing from the backlist as many as they can manage.