View Single Post
Old 01-10-2009, 11:25 AM   #70
Elfwreck
Grand Sorcerer
Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Elfwreck's Avatar
 
Posts: 5,185
Karma: 25133758
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: SF Bay Area, California, USA
Device: Pocketbook Touch HD3 (Past: Kobo Mini, PEZ, PRS-505, Clié)
Quote:
Originally Posted by kazbates View Post
I must be missing something! Why would they go through all the trouble of scanning a paperback when the original was probably submitted in some digital form, ie. MS doc, etc (this applies to more recently published books)?
That last bit is exactly it--digital submission of manuscripts has only been industry standard for a few years. When Steve Jackson Games started demanding digital submissions for their magazine, back in about 1990, there was much shrieking and yelling about how that was unfairly biased against people with typewriters and not computers. And that's a tiny, geek-oriented company with a strong online following; they ran one of the early popular BBSes. (io.com)

Anything published before 1990 probably doesn't have an existing digital edition. Anything published before 2000, it's questionable--a digital version may exist somewhere, but might be in an unusable format. (Wordstar? Saved on a floppy disc nobody can read? Stuck on a Win95 hard drive in a basement?) Even since then, if the publisher wasn't being conscious of ebook sales possibilities, they may have discarded the original as soon as a print-ready file was made, and discarded that as soon as the print run was done, for mid-level authors where they don't expect a second edition.
Elfwreck is offline   Reply With Quote