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Originally Posted by JSWolf
I have to go with the fact that some publishers are greedy. They hire staff or some company to make their eBooks and they do a piss poor job doing so. I've see way too many cases of poorly made eBooks. I've had to go in an fix them to make them comfortably readable. Why can't they make eBooks that are good to go without the need to fix them?
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Well, Wolfie, as you know, I would certainly agree with you on that front. I do believe, in my heart of hearts, that most BPHs didn't understand what would happen when they shipped thousands of DT backlist books to India for scanning and production. NOW, that doesn't excuse their wilful blindness to the subsequent eBooks--that's simply wrong. Maybe their attitude is wait and see? If enough people complain and/or buy it, they'll have it done properly? (yeah, right....)
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Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
Hitch, I think he major problem is not with the new works, but with the ever lengthening copyright (due to the US). Example, how many Robb White books will even be e-books? Yet they were enjoyable Juveniles. How much work of middle tier writers of 60 years ago is slowly disappearing?
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What's that got to do with publishers? They're not the ones holding copyright over decades, folks.
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Originally Posted by pwalker8
This is actually the tragedy of the ever extending copyright term. Only a small number of books are actually commercially viable 20 or 30 years after they were originally published, much less 60 years later. I think back to some of the books that I was a big fan of when I was a kid and a lot of them are no longer available.
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As I said above, that has nothing to do with publishers. Don't confuse Disney--a content creator--with Random House. The creators of the material are those who hold copyright (and their heirs and devisees), and while I hate to see some books disappearing, it is ever so. The heir or devisee has the right to do with the book(s) as s/he sees fit.
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Originally Posted by Dutchbook
I agree with you Hitch, but with the addition that there are horrible publishers out there. In my experience, these usually are small (less than 5 employees, often only a single person companies) but the only thing they do is contacting the Dale M. Courtney’s of the world or googling for public domain stuff. Then they slap a cover on it, lavishly promoting their own role in the “about” page and call it a day.
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Of course there are, but when people talk about 'greedy publishers' you know damned well that they are discussing Random House et al, not "Big Dog Publishing" of Minnetonka, or whatever.
And let's not confuse pay-for-play businesses that CALL themselves "publishers" with
publishers, right? Those houses out there with $X,000 publishing packages, for which an author gets a cover design, an interior layout (of some quality or the other), an alleged edit--don't get me started--and uploading/distro via IS. Given that they do only a skosh more than we do, for like, 5x the price, it's enough to make me scream.
(To be fair, we don't do covers or edits. But most of these people are effectively paying to have their books uploaded. It's absurd.)
Hitch