Quote:
Originally Posted by nabsltd
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.
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.
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First off, you grossly underestimate the time and effort to produce a professional quality ebook. It's not just a case of scan, it's also a case of editing the result to catch all the scan errors and formatting. Multiple that times the number of books (Asimov, for example, had hundreds of books) and it becomes a significant expense. That begs the question of if the literary estate actually has a copy of the books in question that is available for scanning.
Second, what ever makes you think that publishers keep an electric copy of every book they have published since 1995? If you check out the manuscript requirements, you will see that as late as 2015, publishers where still requiring manuscripts on paper, not electronic format. [ (
http://www.writersdigest.com/online-...g-a-manuscript) note the last requirement, Use 20-lb bond paper].
Some authors might keep copies, though there are still some authors who prefer to write long hand. But then you run into format issues (with the various formats of Word, Word Perfect and numerous other programs) and the standard failure to back up. Those floppy disk that people use to back up to tend to go bad.
It's really not as straight forward and simplistic as you think.