Quote:
Originally Posted by mores
A thought just occurred to me ... would it be possible to send that file to the original publisher, or copyright holder, or whoever, and offer it to them so that they can then sell it legitimately? Maybe ask for compensation?
Is that advisable?
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I've considered contacting some authors of out-of-print books & offering to convert their works to ebooks for free, if they're willing to offer them for sale in non-DRM'd formats.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Logseman
I don't think it would work. It's not like they don't publish the book because they don't have an editable manuscript (particularly in novels from the last 20 years which are already written in computers), but usually because they don't see how they can sell such a book with a profit. Ebooks are still a minority niche, filled with geeks, Fan-Sci fans, public domain, darknet users and a Kindle dominion.
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Anything not published in the last 10 years, they probably don't have a digital copy of. Publishers often don't keep digital copies once the print run is done, and print-ready digital copies from more than 10 years ago generally weren't PDFs, so even if they still have them, they're not usable. This may include anything not released as an ebook when it was published, even more recently; the publisher may not have a digital file if the book is considered out-of-print.
That's why so many backlist ebooks are full of atrocious OCR errors--they're chopping & scanning a pbook because nobody has the final digital file anymore.