A decade ago e-book publishing was expected to completely reshape the book market, but the apocalypse for printed books that had been predicted did not occur; in fact, I will argue that there is a niche function in which e-books tend to foster rather than to harm the book market as a whole. This chapter aims at demonstrating that, if used judiciously, the e-book can be of great help to scholars and that it offers advantages to publishing houses in disseminating classic texts in e-book format. In particular, I will focus on the unprecedented opportunity to recover unpublished texts or those that were last published decades ago and that have since been set aside because publication was not economically feasible. Given that the cost for editions in e-book format is exceptionally low compared to their physical counterpart, publishers now have the unique opportunity to make decisions driven only by cultural and literary considerations. An example of this new approach is Clásicos Hispánicos, an e-book publishing venture created by a university scholar and a group of students in Madrid, of which I was a member, who undertook the project after realizing that there were no serious digital publishers for classical works of Hispanic literature in comprehensive scholarly editions.

As a result of this project, it was suddenly possible to recover material that had been neglected or even forgotten for cultural, political, or economic reasons. Another important aspect of such editions is that they are produced under the aegis of recognized academics, who annotate the texts with footnotes that explain them in historical, literary, and linguistic terms. Such an approach may help to undo the cultural stigma currently attached to electronic collections, which are widely considered ipso facto to be of poor quality and without scholarly rigor. It shows, on the contrary, that the era of digital editions need not imply a loss of quality but can even constitute an improvement for scholars and devotees of literature alike, who also benefit from a lower price structure. After reviewing a few general issues related to the e-book as a basis for discussion of the rivalry between e-books and print books, I will return to Clásicos Hispánicos and lay out some different examples of relevant texts and explain their utility.