How Deep Has Digital Backlist Gone?

E-book reading is becoming more common, and one way publishers are trying to take advantage of the growth in the use of digital readers is by plumbing their backlists, refurbishing classic and forgotten literature with new digital editions. But how much backlist is still there for the picking? As it turns out, a fair amount, especially in the case of nonfiction.

Looking through PW’s archives at the top 25 bestselling books of both 1992 and 1982 in fiction and nonfiction (100 titles total), we found 56 books that had Kindle e-book editions. Between fiction and nonfiction, the former fared much better: 39 of the 50 fiction titles had e-book editions, compared to 17 of the 50 nonfiction titles.

A few factors contributed to the disparity. Illustrated books like James Gurney’s Dinotopia and Nick Bantock’s Sabine’s Notebook simply wouldn’t transfer over as EPub files and would be more suitable as apps. Other absences—like the lack of e-book editions for big names such as Clive Cussler and James A. Michener—will no doubt be rectified soon. Many of Cussler’s recent titles have e-book editions, but his 1992 bestseller Sahara has not yet been moved into digital. Random House, Michener’s publisher, is in the process of bringing most of the author’s many novels to digital.

The bestselling nonfiction books from 20 and 30 years ago include several of-the-moment books that wouldn’t have a market today as e-books. Cookbooks like Weight Watchers 365-Day Menu Cookbook (#11 bestselling nonfiction title of 1982) and health and science titles like Life Extension by Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw (#5 bestselling nonfiction title of 1982) have long since been replaced by more up-to-date books on similar topics. And while, of course, some fiction bestsellers from 1982 and 1992 have gone out of print, an especially large number of nonfiction bestsellers from these years are no longer in print—a clear sign that creating digital editions of these books might not be a worthwhile undertaking.

There are some previous bestsellers still in print that have yet to release digital versions, including Robert A. Heinlein’s Friday, Where Is Joe Merchant? by Jimmy Buffett, Benjamin Hoff’s The Te of Piglet, and Richard E. Burke’s The Senator. Of the 100 books in the lists we compiled, only one out-of-print title is currently available as an e-book: Open Road published the e-book edition of Howard Fast’s Max in 2011, but no print edition is currently available.