SciFi and Fantasy eBook Club discussion

Okay, today I hit the Recommendations button, scrolled down to select recommendations by genre (in this case, science fiction). Lo and behold, one of the recommendations was the first book of a trilogy I dearly loved. Sword of the Lamb

Of course I instantly rated it and the two following books and added them to my books. But then it occurred to me...Why do I NOT have these wonderful books in e-book format?

So I went to both Amazon and BN....only to discover that I don't have them in e-book format...because they have not been published in e-book format.

These books were published in the very early 80's, I do believe.

My Question is...aside from clicking on "tell the publisher I want to read this on my kindle/nook" links.....is there any way fans can petition publishers (once you find out who publishes the books LOL) to have older books published as e-books?

Sorry for responding to an old thread, but I am new here and just found it today.

Welcome to my world.

These days almost any new book is immediately available in an ebook format. It's not a huge deal; the book was probably submitted to the publisher in electronic form and pblishing it in electronic format is a very tiny extra expense. In fact it's easier to publish an ebook than a traditional paper book so we see much self-published material in ebook format only.

It was not always this way. Before ebooks it was necessary to typeset from the manuscript and this product is not necessarily easily convertible to an ebook.

So what we have is this period between the end of copyright protection and the beginning of electronic submission where material is available only on paper. The classics have been made available by groups like Project Gutenberg because it's legal to transcribe from an existing paper copy. You can't do that for things like Sword of the Lamb. So it falls into this wasteland where only paper is available.

You could write a letter to the publisher, as you suggest. Problem is, most of these books are not particularly popular, and there are plenty of used paper copies available to take care of the demand that is there. From the publisher's point of view, why invest the money in digitizing a book when there is no indication that enough copies would sell to justify the expense?

Of course the good news is that there is plenty of material available out there as ebooks to keep me busy for the rest of my life.

Clay wrote: "My Question is...aside from clicking on "tell the publisher I want to read this on my kindle/nook" links.....is there any way fans can petition publishers (once you find out who publishes the books LOL) to have older books published as e-books? "

About the only other thing I could think of might be an online petition: If you can gather enough signatures to convince a publisher there's a viable market, they may consider that (a bunch of names, obtained at once, has to look better to them than the sporadic "click to notify publisher" ticks).

What really gets my goat is when the first beloved series is re-published in ebook format. For instance, Piers Anthony's adept series. When all 6 are released, I will jump in and get them all. But, I don't want to start purchasing only to find they will not re-publish them all.

But, oh, when one of these series is totally released . . . happy day! Just found out that Christopher Stasheff's Warlock Series and the Mageworlds series by Debra Doyle, James D. MacDonald.

Doing happy dance . . .

The other issue (besides the mechanics of going from paper to digital) is who owns the e-book rights: the publisher who owns the print rights or the author? Since pre-ebook-era publishing contracts generally did not specifically address that, it seems that in some cases, at least, it is ambiguous at best as to who can actually e-publish some older books, unless the author (or in cases like Roger Zelazny, his estate) and the publisher can come to an amicable agreement.

There was this Singularity & Co group that announced last summer it was trying to rescue out-of-print SF books as eBooks.

Thanks for that link...I do believe that I will become a subscriber LOL. I have a couple of suggestions for them. (I've already msged Juanita Coulson on FB to ask permission to suggest her Children of the Stars Series). Though they do tend to focus on the really old stuff, I am hoping that they can be convinced to "rescue" some of the newer stuff that was published before the "digital age".....like Mrs. Coulson's books, White Wing, and the books I mentioned in the first post of this thread!