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Originally Posted by karunaji
Publishers have used digital files for printing exclusively last 15-20 years but at the same time they often can't find a digital copy of their published paper books. It shows how irresponsible they were towards archiving.
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They were not irresponsible. Cheap data storage is a new thing; 10 years ago, a 20gb hard drive cost more than $200. Twenty years ago, you couldn't buy that much storage space in a single device.
And what if they did store those files? Modern computers won't even run the software they were using to format the books for printing. They might've put them in PDF format, using Distiller for Acrobat 4.0; if they need to make any changes today, they'll need to convert & reformat entirely. But mostly, they put them in a nice postscript file, printed, and after the print run was done for hc & pb, they deleted the file to make space for new books.
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If properly implemented, overhead costs of backup storing would be minimal and considerably lower than repeated OCR and proofreading. It is a perfect textbook example of a business failure due to considering only short term goals.
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Overhead costs would be low now. Ten years ago, arranging long-term storage involved IT costs, database creation costs (and what program would that be in? Could they use it today? How much should they spend upgrading to new software every few years as database tech changes?), storage of the drives themselves, tracking the licenses on all the necessary software and noting what goes obsolete when... I don't think they were short-sighted for not realizing that, in less than a decade, changes in IT tech would drastically affect the way every company does business.
I *really* don't think they were short-sighted for not correctly guessing what those changes would be and arranging their archives in a way that would work today.
Suppose they *had* decided to start saving every print-ready book... and now they have a swarm of Pagemaker 4.0 files. Is it really that much easier to convert those to epub (with all the scrambled formatting the conversion will cause) than to scan & OCR the book again? Was it worth the cost of keeping *all* their books, in order to have a digital copy of the few dozens they'd want to reprint at some point?