Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Publishers don't have the budget to hire people to format the *entire* backlist they intend to produce; they don't have any numbers to indicate that they'd make enough extra in sales to justify those. And they have no interest in hiring one or two people; they'd only consider it if they had a budget and workflow process that worked on a large scale. Smaller publishers, who are happy to hire people to convert older books, do so piecemeal rather than having steady work.
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I think that the process is profitable but the profits are not big enough for them to bother. They could hire a couple of people and sell produced e-books for small profit but that would only a rounding error in their total turnover. Let's say, they produce 80 e-books and manage to get additional $1000 per year. They simply are not interested. And that's sad because many people would love to read those books if they were available.
There is a similar situation with books in Latvian. I am a member of non-profit organization which wants to reprint an important book that has been out of sale for 10 years already. The rights belong to the publishing house and we offered to cover all costs and simply pay them royalties. They are not interested because it will be only 2000 copies and they don't care about several hundred euros even if thye don't have to do anything at all.
In the meantime the availability of pirated (free of DRM) Latvian e-books is much bigger than any sales. Publishers who want to sell e-books are irrationally stuck with DRM implementation. If they dropped the DRM, many problems would go away and sales would increase overnight.
This comment says it all.