Quote:
Originally Posted by sweenm
Surely all books are in electronic format! So why don’t they get published this way?
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A lot of publishers seem to believe every ebook sale is a lost hardcover sale. And if they don't quite believe that, they think every ebook sale is two dozen lost paperback sales, as "of course" their customers will release free bootleg versions of the book online.
Several authors, and possibly some publishers, believe that ebooks are inherently "wrong"--that books should be read on paper, that you should feel the weight of the book and enjoy the riffling of the pages and all that, and refuse to release books in other formats.
And while pretty much all books produced in the last 25+ years have had an electronic version, not all of those versions were kept, and not all are convertible to ebook formats. So any publisher wanting to convert a 1995 bestseller to ebook format probably has to start from scratch--scan & OCR & proofread from the printed version, and then pick one or more ebook formats and do the formatting for that/those.
There are a lot of potential reasons why any particular book isn't available as a legal ebook; most of them boil down to paranoia or anti-technology philosophies. A few are just short-sightedness, not knowing the market demand.