Quote:
Originally Posted by phenomshel
I was just thinking that - If the book is digitally created in the first place (by digitally created, I mean written on a computer in a word processor), it's ALREADY in a digital format (obviously) and it takes about five seconds to convert it to almost anything ELSE you want it in...
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NEW books are already digital. Books more than 10 years old, often are not, or not anymore; whatever digital files were used in the creation process are long gone. So creating ebooks out of out-of-print books often involves scanning & OCRing them, with all the accompanying proofreading hassles.
And the process between "Receive Word doc" (or similar) and "print paper" involves some conversion--fonts, paragraph settings, layout, swirly pictures at chapter breaks, and so on. The process between "Word doc" and "proper ebook" (lit, mobi, epub, ereader for the most part) is a different conversion--it has to create metadata, a digital table of contents, page breaks by chapters, and so on. They could auto-convert to basic text, or to "text + bold & italics," but more than that takes formatting time. Also, it gets more complex when there are pictures involved.
I believe It's no harder than setup for print--but it's <i>different</i>. And while a good XML markup could work for both, most publishers haven't yet figured that out. (And it does take both technical awareness & real time/money resources to set up to do on a large scale--they first have to be convinced it's worth the investment.)
However... even with all those setbacks, the people here are aware that "convert well-formatted document to good ebook" can be as little as a few minutes, perhaps a couple of hours if it's very complex. (Dictionaries are complex.) Most of the extra time involved in book conversion is fixing formatting problems or typos/OCR errors.
The idea that a publishing house can't afford to spend ~2 hours per ebook (let's assume some time for metadata & other weirdness) in order to release an edition that costs no storage fees and has no return from the distributors is insane.