This article in KMWorld explores the complexity of comprehensively digitizing print books. Here's an excerpt:
We’d all like to have a way to move the contents of a book into an ebook and from there into a Web page and then into a display suitable for the tiniest of screens and then have it read itself aloud to someone with impaired vision and then have it automatically decompose into daily blog posts and then reassemble itself into a book, all without any loss of data or metadata. Of course, we’d all like that to be done with nothing but open source tools.
Well, not all of us share the dream. Some of the leading manufacturers of dedicated electronic reading devices view themselves as content companies, not as device manufacturers. They want to vertically integrate themselves so that they are the sole source for the books we read on their devices. They also want to make it difficult to move a book from one device to another, for fear we might share it, the way we share physical books. For if there is one thing we want the digital revolution to provide us, it is more restrictions on how we use what we buy than we have in the physical world. At least that’s what we want in Sarcasm World.
You'll want to read it in full.