[teh603]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Lawrence Watt-Evans doesn't have the rights or control to release certain of his books in e-editions, and then it becomes up to the publisher to do so, which they often don't.

He's previously blogged in the past about how he wished the two "missing" Ethshar books right in the middle of the series (which also happen to be out of print) were available because he's well aware that they kind of screw the reading order for his fans (especially since one of them is an important linking volume that's part of a major story arc involving the warlocks).

But unlike the early rights-reverted ones he took to Wildside (who did e-editions), and the latest ones he writes via a subscription model on his website (which then get picked up and paper/e-printed by Wildside as well), he can't release them himself because Tor or whoever it was who bought the series after he moved over from Del Rey/Ballantine either has no plans to release e-versions/isn't returning the rights.

See, this is why I don't classify sales in used bookstores as stolen sales the way the big publishers do. Most of the time, the books in the used bookstores are already out of print and aren't available anywhere else.

Unfortunately, the publishers have already circled the wagons and are doing everything they can to prevent any secondary distribution of books, even print ones. Never mind that they've already taken the print books I want out of print so I have no choice but to get it in the secondary market or download a bootleg.

Case in point, the Knights of the Old Republic sourcebook for Star Wars Saga Edition. The print run was so pathetically short and the book so insanely popular that six months later it was gone from the shelves and selling for about $500 on Amazon. Its unavailable as of this writing, don't bother looking. The only way you can get it now is to download a bootleg copy, and I knew a lot of people who would've bought it if WotC had made it available.

Then again, WotC is slowly digging its own grave by inches. Their only really popular product line left is Magic since they started the D&D edition war.

In Baen's case, the guy who managed most of their Webscription activity died last year and it turned out he was doing a lot of the associated work on a basically volunteer basis, so they'd been scrambling to replace him, and it costs to bring books older than Webscriptions (which dates back to 1999, IIRC) back into e-print simply due to different file formats and such which have to be converted over.

Nuclear reformatting can't be that hard. Open the document in a word processor, copy into notepad, paste, save as .txt. Done in less than five minutes. Hopefully they didn't use a bizarre word processor like Appleworks 16 (as in Apple IIgs era), Symentec GreatWorks, or Nissus Writer.

They are slowly filling in the gaps for some of the series by the really popular authors with moderately high demand (some of those Mercedes Lackey books, and some Anne McCaffrey stuff, for example). And Baen has had to remove books from their old Webscription bundles because the authors have withdrawn distribution rights, planning their own releases now that the market is growing (Doranna Durgin, Holly Lisle, and probably some others I haven't noticed).

The only surprise here is that the authors didn't try doing this earlier. It doesn't take much to generate a PDF; the classic Macs had an rdev called Print2PDF as early as the late '90s that could generate a PDF of any word processing document.