[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by mldavis2

Since most books, aside from coffee-table display hardcover books, are simple text, the comment doesn't fit most high volume, high profit pop novels. Anything that is re-published as a paperback is most likely not jazzed up with fancy fonts and formatting wizardry.

Chart/image-heavy books are also better in print (which, I agree, is not pop fiction, although even the maps inside the covers of fantasy novels often don't translate well to e-formats). The majority of MMPBs convert very well to ebooks.

It is claimed that my Kindle3 can hold up to 3,000 books.

That's assuming basic text books; number of books with more than a cover picture is much lower. But yes, a substantial amount.

If my little Kindle can hold a couple thousand books with illustrations, storage for the entire inventory of major publishers should be no problem at all.

It isn't--now. Ten years ago, it was. And the software has been in such constant flux that nobody's ever sure how much is worth keeping. Also, deleting files as soon as a contract has run its course avoids legal liability for those files. Companies have a reason *not* to keep digital content forever.

For pop novel publishing, RTF is universally readable by everything from browsers to Microsoft products to Open Office. There are always conversion tools available if there is a need.

RTF needs additional work before it's ready for either print or e-publishing. They'd presumably want to keep the print-ready PDF as well, and any e-formats they released. XML is probably the best format for long-term storage, but for that to be useful, they need a semantic markup system that they consistently apply.

I don't know the publishing industry; I do know the litigation support industry that scans legal documents & does e-discovery. The lack of standardization is almost terrifying. I suspect publishing is similar: while they're all likely to use RTF at some point in the production process, it may not be what the final proofed version is. (These days, I'd expect the final version to be in InDesign--and converting from InDestign to RTF for storage can lose a lot of the ID formatting. Proofing in ID is better for print; you can see what your changes do to the page layout. Proofing in RTF doesn't allow that.) Also, RTF gets huge with extensive formatting and multiple fonts, which if it's feeding somehow to ePub, can be a problem.

And whatever a publisher's processes, they were developed in direct competition with other publishers; they don't *want* to come up with an across-the-industry system that gives nobody any advantages. They don't want to use universal semantic markup; they want a version that won't be useful to their competitors if their systems are hacked, or, more likely, an ex-employee walks away with a flash drive full of ebooks.