Quote:
Originally Posted by maddz
Which ties in with the slowing down of backlist conversions. I suspect the only way many of these titles will ever get converted is by scanning, OCR and proof-reading as they were either written on paper or nobody can access the electronic files anymore (either because of format drift or because no-one has hardware able to read the file anymore).
(My thesis is in that situation - it was written on an electronic typewriter and the digital file can’t be read anymore.) Even some early Word files I have problems with, and I’ve got to covert some ClarisWorks files from a friend’s father’s Performa (which is still usable - thank goodness - our PowerPCs went to the tip when we moved 3 years ago) and get them into a more modern format for an iMac to access.
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Yep. Even by the mid 80's, PC's were not all that common. I'm not sure when the cut over was when most books were written on computers and yes, then you have the format drift.
It's kind of funny in that OCR hardware and software has improved tremendously, but I suspect for many of the backlist books still not converted, it would be hard to cost justify converting them, just from a profit point of view. Let's face it, you just aren't going to sell that many copies of works like da Cruz's The Ayes of Texas or Daniel Hood's Fanuilh series to list two slightly obscure titles that are on my to buy list if they ever hit ebooks. Or for something less obscure, Asimov's Black Widowers series.