Digitization and Conversion Project Opens Doors to Vast Digital Archive

Publisher Partners with Innodata Isogen to Extend Publishing Life of Thousands of Popular Out-of-Print Titles

Challenge

Since 1924, Simon & Schuster has published thousands of titles with millions of pages of text and images. Classics such as Will Durant's "The Story of Philosophy," James Hilton’s "Lost Horizon" and Margaret Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind" are regularly reprinted. However, many titles exist solely as fragile out-of-print tomes stored in rare book sections of libraries and with limited access to the public.

Simon & Schuster viewed this vast backlist as an untapped asset and recognized that making it digitally available to the public would serve as valuable tool in connecting their books to new readers and as a potential source of additional revenue for authors. But low demand for these titles also made the cost of reprinting those titles economically unfeasible.

Advances in digital book production, however, make it possible for publishers to economically extend the publishing life for books with lower sales volumes. At the same time, Simon & Schuster also recognized that trying to convert those titles on its own would be an expensive time-consuming project...