[xristy]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Fantastic, but the entire problem here is having to pay multiple times for multiple editions of a book. (one price for tablet, one price for PC, etc. etc.) The entire advantage of the EPUB is that you get ONE FILE that can scale and be run on larger or smaller devices.

Maybe if these publishers charged a ONE TIME fee, and then you can get access to ALL PDFs, that would be fantastic.

O'Reilly is a publisher which does charge a one-time fee for the set of mobi/ePub/PDF/Daisy with no DRM! Certainly it is a pricing choice and nothing inherent in the use of multiple sized PDFs.

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

You can only hope! But I don't even think that any sort of book with very complex equations would be very economical to convert from book scans (this book would have to be an older book that would still be expected to sell well, and still be relevant today, where the publisher doesn't have access to the original source).

Ooops! I forgot to add .

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Yep yep. Hopefully my work is good enough though where I have an extremely low error rate. (Another reason why you want to pay for quality conversion and avoid those cheap guys).

That is part of the reason why we release everything as PDF/EPUB (sell MOBIs on Amazon), and sell physical books on Amazon/our store/elsewhere.

As I have mentioned, I get very good results with Acrobat X and good quality scans.

I don't know what Archive.org is doing but their results are not very uplifting as far as OCR'd PDFs and searching.

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Side Note: You also have publishers who don't want to release a lot of their backlog, because they believe it will compete with their new book sales. There are also a ton of out-of-print works, in which the publishers have zero intention of bringing back to print. There are a ton of books which we would like to reprint, but the copyright owner either can't be found (orphan works), or tries to demand outrageous license fees for.

I once asked, "if we ever do pay for the license fees, would they help us by giving us the source files?" I was laughed at. So yeah, even if are going through all the legitimate channels, I doubt that many of these publishers would give you access to the source to make your life easier (although maybe if you worked at a big publisher, things might be different). So you would still be relegated to working backwards from a scan/PDF/OCR.

The license fees most likely make it unprofitable for us to even offer a reprint/digital edition, so we almost never do it. This is a huge problem when you look at all the hundreds of thousands/millions of out-of-print books which are in the same exact situation.

Thanks for that observation.