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To give an analogy, it's a bit like photography. My sister does commercial photography for real estate. She's lucky to get in 5 or 6 shoots a week. Yea, you and I could walk around with our cell phones and be done in 15 minutes. Yea, she could walk around and take a series of shots in the space of an hour or two. However, for commercial quality photos, she has to set up the lighting, use special lens and clean the photo up in order to make the photos attractive for potential buyers on the web. Most professional photographers are lucky to get 2 or 3 quality shots per 100 pictures, it can actually be a lot lower ratio than that depending on the subject.
A professional quality ebook isn't just scanning it and running it through the spell checker. That's certainly good enough for most PD books, but not if you expect to make money off of it.
To answer an earlier question, I would be quite surprised if more than half of Asimov's backlist would break the 1000 sales mark. Remember, he wrote more than 500 books and most of his most famous books/short stories are already out.
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