That stands to reason. In the days before digital storage, there would've been no economical, or even physically possible, way to do that. Physical type is heavy! And expensive! Never mind keeping a whole book's worth, once the plate for a given page was made, the master type would have to be broken up and reorganized into the next one. As for the days after digital storage when they still didn't do it, well... the publishing industry is famous for the glacial pace at which it adopts new technologies, which is kind of funny for an industry that was literally founded on fast-paced technological innovation.

>They might keep printing plates in case they needed to do another print run,
>but if they were gonna bring out a new edition, audiobooks included, the
>procedure was to go back to the author for a fresh copy of the manuscript.

Mm, and that would be tricky in this particular instance, since Edward Gibbon died in 1794.

>And if the author was no longer available or
>didn't keep a copy, they'd have to hire someone to transcribe what
>they'd printed.

Or just forego editability altogether and photographically reproduce an earlier edition page by page! That happens even today. The people who republished Edward Jablonski's Flying Fortress a few years ago seem to have literally just... scanned an existing copy of the 1968 edition, printed it out, and stuck it between a new set of covers. Maybe they didn't even scan it, it might just be a stack of photocopies. The reproduction of the photos from the original (of which I have a copy, but it's falling apart, hence why I bought a copy of the repop) looks exactly like you would expect a photocopy of a book page to look.

>I think they would say that OCR errors are to be expected in audiobook
>scripts for books published more than about 10-15 years ago.

Well, yeah, but what I don't understand is... it's an audiobook. Why didn't they just have him... like... read the book?

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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