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> Publishers and copyright is also the reason why most books are not digitized. There are also cost issues even when the book is already public domain. Yes, th
by Mediterraneo10 6y ago
> Publishers and copyright is also the reason why most books are not digitized.
There are also cost issues even when the book is already public domain. Yes, there have been efforts to scan a lot of old books, but often that has just been making fairly low-resolution scans with little or no clean-up process, and assembling those scans into huge and ungainly PDFs. That is OK for old prose works where a reader may only need to consult a single page. But appropriately digitizing something like a book of elaborately typeset poetry, or an art book (i.e. a large-format book with reproductions of paintings) requires a great deal of human effort, and that is expensive. It is no surprise that the print format still reigns in those genres.
- sjy 6y agoI read a lot of those huge and ungainly scanned PDFs, even when the text is available as HTML, because I prefer my reference material to be properly typeset and paginated. It’s much more convenient than visiting my local library and handling physical books, which I wouldn’t use at all if a scanned PDF was always available. I’m with the grandparent here – the problem isn’t the amount of work required to republish a book in a digital-first format like EPUB. It’s the fact that sharing books electronically in any format is a copyright violation, so the scans that exist already aren’t publicly accessible in DRM-free formats. That being the case, recreating those books in digital-first formats requires even more effort (because you have to find and scan the book first), for almost no reward (because you can’t publish the results).