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Originally Posted by pwalker8
For the heirs, it's more just something that's kind of out there that might be worth some money, kind of like your grandfather's coin collection. If someone approaches them, they might be interested, but it has to be for the right price.
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For an author like Asimov, the estate is making pretty close to zero on his books right now, as most are out of print. And, even of the ones that aren't, I suspect that a lot of the sales are used copies. So, if they want to make any money, they're going to have to do something, and an eBook would be by far the biggest amount of money in their pocket, because it might get all the fans who already have paper copies of the books to spend more money.
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Most of these books would barely make back what it cost to commercially produce the ebook.
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With a $500 scanner, I could take any print copy of the book and turn it into an ePub with about 40 hours worth of work, and I'm not a pro...a pro could likely do it much faster. I've taken crappy OCR from other people and done it in less than 40 hours, too. So, even if you paid somebody, it would be about $1,000-2,000 to have a book done. Since they're a pro, I'd expect Kindle-ready plus ePub for that price.
Put it up at Amazon for $5, and you make a profit at 600 copies with the 70% royalty rate, and you only need to sell 1200 copies at the 35% rate. Do you really think the first eBook release of
any Asimov fiction won't sell 1000 copies worldwide?
Basically, eBooks are the one format that an author's estate can make money on without having to pay somebody else a large percentage of the profits, because it can be done by any moderately skilled person. For authors like Asimov, there's a bit of work because there isn't an electronic copy of the original for many of the books, but for more modern authors, most worked with some kind of word processor, and if you've got the files, you're really only a few hours away from an ePub.
This is one reason I feel that large publishers are basically criminals as far as eBooks are concerned. They have access to those electronic originals for pretty much every book published since 1995, yet instead they use a printed book as a source and OCR it. Just today I fixed up a book that was originally published in 1997, yet Berkley couldn't even find a copy that used proper typographic quotes when they did the OCR.