[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by karunaji

Come on, they used automatic backup systems on tapes 15 years ago.

And had to store those tapes in ways they wouldn't get damaged. Why bother, for the few titles that would ever be reprinted?

PageMaker installs fine on Windows XP which is still the most popular OS in business.

If you can find it. It's no longer available; InDesign is Adobe's current page layout program. So you have to import, hope that data isn't lost or hopelessly scrambled (if the original had special text boxes set up for layout purposes, they might wind up in the wrong places when it imports), and then sort out fonts & standard layout issues.

The worries about obsolete formats are overblown. I can still open Winword 2.0 files.

I can open almost anything that's ever been used as a word processor--but not with Office 2007, which is what a lot of businesses are using now.

And the issue isn't, "can you open it today?" but "what would it have taken to make it usable for the entire last fifteen years--what software & conversion plugins would've been necessary, and how much did they cost?" Because if you're keeping archives long-term, it's not about "we'll be able to open this in 15 years," but "we'll be able to open this at any point in the next 15 years." Or longer.

A long-term archiving system would have involved converting every book to a new format every couple of years, to keep up with software changes. And that takes devoting real time & resources to archiving, not just having a pile of tapes somewhere that you hope will still be readable when you decide you want those books again.

Why not publish and sell all books in e-format? They could still sell enough copies to offset conversion expenses and even make some money. But it is not cheap if the full process of OCR, formatting, proofreading is required.

Because they don't have the rights to sell them all in e-format. Different contracts with each author, and 15 years ago, ebook rights weren't a standard part of the contract. They might gain those rights (and they might still be able to prevent the author from offering the ebook elsewhere), but they'll have to negotiate each new release.

Why keep huge archives of books they may never have the right to sell?

Any small, independent press could certainly have been archiving its books & be able to reformat them fairly quickly. But for the big publishing houses, with hundreds or thousands of new releases each year--it wasn't economical. It is now, but I don't blame them for not having decided to invest in archiving their entire production runs (and trying to guess which archiving method would work best) over a decade ago.