Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Anything published before 1990 probably doesn't have an existing digital edition. Anything published before 2000, it's questionable--a digital version may exist somewhere, but might be in an unusable format. (Wordstar? Saved on a floppy disc nobody can read? Stuck on a Win95 hard drive in a basement?) Even since then, if the publisher wasn't being conscious of ebook sales possibilities, they may have discarded the original as soon as a print-ready file was made, and discarded that as soon as the print run was done, for mid-level authors where they don't expect a second edition.
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This is very true, even for nonfiction books that I edit. I was always my policy to maintain an electronic copy of the final edited version that I produced for years -- just in case. But I wasn't being paid to store these files for my client publishers and every so often I would discard older files, especially if it looked like there would be no newer edition. But even if the publisher were to ask for the files, in these cases, they would not be exactly what appeared in the print version because after my editing, the files were returned to authors for review and any changes they may have made were not incorporated in my files. The same is true for the proofreading stage, which followed the author review.
As for the books that I edit
and typeset, I do have the final typeset versions with all corrections incorporated. But prior to a few months ago, none of my publisher clients had any interest in having the manuscripts prepared for the possibility of ebooks; the focus was strictly on print. Consequently, even though the electronic files exist, they are not wholly suitable for conversion to ebooks. They would require some work to be made so. Again, these books are not novel-like, that is, essentially straight text; these books are significantly more complex. Only in the past few months have my publisher-clients decided that it is worth the time and cost to have these books prepared from the start for possible conversion to ebooks.
But the point is that the publishers rarely maintain their own libraries of the electronic files. If they are maintained at all, they are maintained by the vendors who did the typesetting, and the typesetting industry has dramatically changed in the past 2 decades. Many typesetters have gone out of business; others have consolidated; an increasing number of books are typeset in a country other than the publisher's country; and an increasing number are typeset by freelancers. There is no set repository or control over the final files.