I would like to know what percentage of (in-print vs. out of print
would be helpful) books are available within digital format?

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 15 Aug 2005 11:14 PDT

Pretty interesting question...!

The answer depends on a lot of things, including just what you meand
by "available".

These days, most book publishing is done electronically, so that
before a book exists on paper, it is first created in electronic form.
 Therefore, close to 100% of new books can be said to exist in digital
format.  However, very few of these electronic files are actually
available to the public as as e-books.

Perhaps you can let us know a bit more about what your interests are, here.


As to older books, it has been estimated that there are anywhere from
74-175 million distinct book titles have been published throughout
history.  The vast majority of these are NOT in digital format.  I
could make some educated guesses as to how many ebooks there are, but
I'm sure it numbers in the thousands rather than the millions, meaning
that much, much  less that 1% of historical books are available
electronically.

Let me know what you think.


pafalafa-ga

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Clarification of Question by ajones3066ga-ga on 15 Aug 2005 13:21 PDT

Actually, I was looking at what % of new titles are available to the
public as e-books.

My interest in the question happens to be from the use of the e-book
as a teaching tool and its lack of adoption by the educational
community.  I understand that some e-books are merely text sites of
old translations that make the texts "searchable" (which has problems
due to its lack of connection to current scholarship or lack of
authenticity checks). I also understand there is a lack of standards
from ps files, pdf files, ebook files, etc., but I would be interested
in seeing the availability of titles.

Allen