[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by Tamara

A major component that Mr. Bova overlooks is the cost of marketing and promoting titles nowadays so they don't get lost in the shuffle especially for newer authors. There is still typesetting/proofreading for all the different reader formats too.

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

Why would they need proof readers for each different format? Given the number of mistakes in all the commercial ebooks I have bought so far, I'm not really convinced they employ them at all.

I think there is a need for two different types of proofreaders:

- A text checker

- A format checker

The job of the text checker is to ensure that the text of the ebook is correct. He/She is not concerned with the formatting the text will take (and would likely work with a plain text editor), just the text itself. One text checker team is all that is needed for a particular ebook since that plain text file can act as a source for many different formats. Concerning graphics, they would be provided separately in a common format at high resolution, and markers would provided in the text file.

The job of the format checker is to ensure that an ebook is correctly formatted (both the way it is displayed and the file format) for a particular ereader. Since the text should already be accurate to the original source, all the format checker team should have to do is ensure that the text displays properly on an ereader and put the graphics in the proper places. In this case, you would like need several format checker teams to accomodate the many different types of ebooks.

The above would likely improve the quality of ebooks.