Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
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. |
I have a friend that works in digital publishing and as a hobby scans old movie novelizations that would otherwise never be released.
Because of the nature of those books, all he has to work with is an old mass market paperback and ABBYY FineReader. Yet he turns out very fine, professional grade scans.
Plus there's all the small-press and self-published reissues of books from the sixties, seventies and eighties, where there definitely weren't electronic manuscripts, possibly no manuscript at all.
Creating a good, quality e-book isn't the Herculean effort you make it out to be.