[craig8128]

I have a question, and I hope that it is not too naive. I'm not sure what else to do but ask, and hopefully those of you with experience will enlighten me.

Here goes: as I understand it, in the 'traditional' publishing industry, a writer assigns copyright to their book to the publisher, and then the publisher prints the book.

There seem to be a great many out-of-print books that are not available in electronic format. Conceivably, an author could "self-re-publish" an ebook version of out-of-print book via Amazon or B&N or etc. But I don't seem to see much of that happening.

Why is this? Is it difficult to convince a publisher to hand back the necessary copyrights to an author? Or do most authors not feel it's worthwhile to release an electronic version? Or is this kind of thing happening all over and I'm just not noticing it for some reason?

(Or are my base assumptions simply wrong? I know this is a complicated ecology, sometimes agents are involved, and shortly after posting this question I caught the thread about "backlist ebook rights", which makes me wonder if publishers even own the ebook rights to older out-of-print books)

I'd greatly appreciate any light that anyone could shine on this. Thanks!

Craig