[Greg Anos]

The problem with midlist (and particularly backlist) books is you can't make a lot of money (gross) off of them. So they get ignored (or overpriced) in the e-book world (such as it is). If you can't increase the gross, maybe you can cut the costs.


One unique cost of e-books is digitzation. It costs money to have somebody scan and proof a paper book. Many older books only exist as
paper, so this must be done. But what is you could get it done for free?

Don't laugh. There are a lot of pirated scanned e-books. This shows that there are people who will scan a book they like. Suppose a publisher offered the following deal....


Author X has been out of print for 20 years. Publisher Y holds the rights. They stick a list of all the backlist authors and titles they hold the rights to on a web site, and offer the following deal. If you, a reader, scan and edit a book on the list and provide the finished file back to the publisher, you get a credit on the e-book - Book X has been scanned and edited by reader Z. A nice association for the reader doing the work, and it cost the publisher zip. If the publisher is feeling really generous, they might offer the reader/scanner a cent a download (possibly as a credit to buy more books from Publisher Y).

Look at the beauty of the system. Publisher Y gets loads of (relatively expensive) scanning done for free or at least with no upfront costs. All Publisher Y has to do is publish a list of Authors/Titles to scan. Yes, Publisher Y has to make room on a server for the backlist books, but that is probably less that a megabyte a book. Less that 1/10 cent a year, including electricity. (Of course, it assumes that Publisher Y already sells some e-books to start with, and this is just piggy-backing off the existing servers. (If this causes extra server traffic, you should be so lucky, because that means customers are looking at (and probably buying) your e-books. Ching!) Plus, this is such a simple job, Publisher Y can have their college intern(s) do it (cheap labor).

Now a publisher won't make boatloads of money this way, BUT, it's free money. And as an extra no-cost bonus, if you keep the price down (say $4 an e-book) you cut the moral legs out from under the pirates. (No more I can't buy the e-book so I have to pirate it.)

P.S. There is one expense I did leave out, which is figuring out who to pay for these backlist titles. But if that's too expensive, maybe the pirates are right.

P.P.S. Look how much money Warner has made off of old (backlist) movies selling the cheap on DVD.