Quote:
Originally Posted by GlennD
I think the problem is that these 30/40/50 year old books don't exist in digital form and it's no cheaper to scan/proofread/typeset a 50 year old book than it is to do the same work for a newer book. A new book at least exists in a digital format already. (I assume so anyway - do publishers still accept type-written manuscripts?)
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No, but it's only the last 5-10 years that they've been *keeping* the digital versions after the main print run is done. Anything written before 2000, you can assume the print-ready version was deleted as soon as the book went out of print.
Storage space cost a lot more back then, and there were probably potential liability issues, and if the book was popular enough to reprint, it'd need to be reformatted anyway. (Storage wasn't too expensive if they thought to manage it. But you had to know that you'd want those files in 15 years to do that. And they'd be in, what, early Pagemaker format? Quark Xpress? Some awful proprietary postscript settings?) They no doubt mostly went through Microsoft Word at some point... but those versions weren't the final print-ready version, so they got deleted as soon as the proofreading on the ARC was done.
Otherwise, though--yes. There's more awareness of profit potential for books from the 80's & 90's than books from the 50's, and they're the same amount of work to convert.
What we're *really* missing is the nonfiction books; the market for those is much smaller, so they're not being converted much at all. The digital revolution is very much biased in favor of entertainment and against time-sensitive facts & opinions.