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In December 2008, Sony offered the free download of a book by L. J. Smith, an author I didn’t know. The book sounded interesting so I tried it, and was pleased to find it was very well written. Apparently this author garnered many fans in the 1990s but her books have been out-of-print until now. One poor woman wrote a fan review of the re-release of Smith’s work saying how it took her five years of searching used book stores to put together a collection of Smith’s work, and expressed her happiness that they were finally being reprinted because her collection had grown “dog-eared” from use.

In all our discussions about how expensive it is for publishers to distribute ebooks there is little mention of the role back-lists like these can play. One of the principle reasons I buy ebook editions is that I’ve run out of shelf space for pbooks. Obviously brick-and-mortar bookstores have the same problem.

What I can’t understand is why publishing houses wouldn’t want to sell their backlists. The cost to store the digital edition of a book is trivial and the “shelf space” for ebook editions would take centuries to fill. So even if they only sell one copy of books like L. J. Smith’s each month until the copyright expires, the sale earns more than the cost of storage and produces revenue from the back-list. The movie industry makes a fortune selling old titles, so why won’t book publishers do it?