It probably has to do with publishing rights. Authors may not want to allow digital publication without an actual print run, and once the initial print run ends they lose the digital rights unless they do another print run. Or the digital publication rights may only be negotiated for a fixed period of time, or else require an ongoing fixed payment to retain, so it costs the publisher money to continue offering a digital version that they may not recoup without sufficient sales.

Halting digital sales might be necessary to declare a write-off and recoup a tax benefit that year. That was happening to some streaming shows, anyway.

Which sci-fi novel?

The Golden Age trilogy by John C. Wright.

I read one of his later works and it was horrid, but Golden Age was incredible. The first several chapters were hard to get into, I quit several times and the people I loaned it to never got past that. But after that it takes off like a rocket. On a reread I found that the difficulty at first was just from so much being unfamiliar.

It's in a distant future with superintelligent AI, immortality, physical abundance and pervasive virtual reality. And in that setting he finds a deeply human tale of epic heroism.

Usually it is because the rights have reverted to the author and the publisher no longer has rights to publish the book.

Meanwhile, the author doesn't own the rights to the cover art/design so they can't just put it up either.

I'm not sure how else you'd want to handle it.

> I'm not sure how else you'd want to handle it.

By having a minimum amount of foresight and putting into the initial contract an agreement which lets the parties maintain the online availability in a mutualy agreeable way.

Why do you think it's a problem of foresight and not simple motivation? Perhaps none of the parties cares about the availability of a book that doesn't make enough money to stay in print. Perhaps having the book become unavailable for some time is perceived as a benefit to the rights holder, allowing them to do a re-launch.

The question wasn’t what is the problem, but “how else you'd want to handle it”.

My point is that it's quite possible that both parties are perfectly happy with the current solution of having the ebook disappear from stores.

It's just us as fans who are not happy.

I've taken a non-fiction tech book offline. It was just really dated and I didn't really want it out there any longer as a result.

> It takes zero effort to keep the book available

It isn’t about the effort. This is the same thing people say about out of print video games, too.

It isn’t about difficulty, it is about incentives. They want you to buy new books and video games, and if you are reading/playing old free ones, that is reduced demand for what they are selling. Why would they want to help you satisfy your need for free?