I suspect fjtorres and the article are correct - the major cost is acquiring the rights to the book. From the article:
Quote:
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Over email, Heald explained that he believes that legal framework is the significant reason behind the disparity, not the technological problems of scanning books or those of consumer preferences. "I would expect the gap between music and books to close quickly if copyright law were reformed. Remember that we see a 94 percent ebook rate among public domain bestsellers from 1913 to 1923. Even if books are more expensive to digitize and the market for eBooks is less profitable, we still see high digitization rates when copyright restrictions are eliminated."
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Those arguing that this is all a result of the difficulty with OCR are missing the point of the article, and make me think that they haven't even bothered reading it.
TL;DR: Long copyright makes some books hard to find, news at 11.