[karunaji]

Originally Posted by tompe

But the main problem is that the process of publishing a book does not contain the final version in electronic format such that it would have been easy to archive it. The final version of the book was what was printed or the film for it.

Not relevant because the final PostScript sent to a film printer was generated from the final electronic file.

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

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

Exactly! Why bother if it doesn't increase their quarterly earning by 3 cents.

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.

Do you want to imply that big publishers are totally inept regarding the core of their business? Or that technological barrier between now and 15 years ago is too great?

I don't believe this. Much simpler explanation is that they did not think in long term perspective.

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.

Does it mean that big companies are less efficient than small ones? That small publishing company I worked 15 years ago had put selected books into a database (Folio views) and was selling it.

If anything, big publishers had considerably greater resources to experiment with ebooks many years ago even though the society and technology was not yet ready. In any case, it wasn't inconceivable that one day we are going to want ebooks. The very least what they could do was to keep backups. But it is no wonder that they didn't: big businesses tend to act irresponsibly.