Quote:
Originally Posted by Gaffer
I doubt that many ebooks are scanned - most would be converted from the same electronic versions that are submitted to the publishers for traditional books. I do agree, however, that the costs for eBooks should be substantially lower than for printed books.
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Most newer ebooks are not scanned; backlist books from more than 5-10 years ago generally are. Most publishers didn't keep their print-ready files once the book had gone out of print--because they'd be reformatting from scratch for a new edition anyway. And cheap digital storage is a relatively new thing; while anyone can save a few ebooks, saving an entire production company's line would take both a lot of archive space, and a lot of administration costs to figure out how to manage them.
What do you keep? The PDF ready for print? It would need to be converted & reformatted. (10-year-old PDFs? Convert them & get hard returns at the end of every line.) The QuarkXpress or Pagemaker file you used to make the PDF? Or maybe you used Microsoft Works. Maybe you used a proprietary program that you eventually abandoned for Indesign--what do you do with those older files now? Do you keep the final .doc/.rtf version from before any of the formatting was done--except that some editing was done after that, to make the page breaks work out. Or all of those? How do you name them in the archive--not long ago, most filenames were limited to 8.3; you need an archiving system just to recognize them 6 years later.
... And so on. The idea of "keep ALL the files; they might be useful someday" is new; for a very long time, publishers have been working with "throw it out once you're not making money from it" to conserve space and resources.
I don't blame them for needing to scan; I'm just upset that they apparently don't bother to proofread the scans at all, and nobody checks the final ebook version before they start selling it.