Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Because the overwhelming majority of books published prior to 20 or so years ago don't exist in any digital format. It costs a considerable amount of money for a publisher to digitise a book; money which they won't spend unless there's a reasonable expectation of a return on their investment.
Added to which there's the very real issue of the fact that they may very well not have publishing rights for an ebook.
We are, though, in a pretty good position compared to where we were 10 or even 5 years ago. The major (and minor) publishers are steadily churning out their back catalogues in ebook format. I've bought a lot of "old" books in the last few years that have newly appeared as ebooks.
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Actually, I believe that the Google books project, which is still ongoing, has scanned in some 12 millions books in partnership with around 30 libraries around the world. While those books aren't available as ebooks per se, they do now exist in digital format.
It always seemed to me that a reasonable compromise for google books was that in return for being able to use the search indexes that they generate from the digitized books, that google should make the digitized book available to the rights holder as the basis for generating an ebook.