Originally Posted by starrigger
I'm sorry, but this is simply wrong, and that's one reason there's so much misunderstanding between the e-reading audience and the people putting out ebooks (or not putting out ebooks). Taking an author's digital file and turning it into a properly formatted ebook is NOT a matter of a few seconds, or even a few steps. It's a time-consuming process that involves inputting minute editing corrections, formatting changes, and going through a different conversion process for every one of those damn ebook formats, and then finding things that are screwed up in the process and fixing them.
Someday it'll be automated, and will seem as simple as you describe. It'll require the creation of ebook-formatted files to be incorporated into the typesetting process. But right now, it's not nearly that simple.
If it were, e-reads would have at least twice as many books out on the market instead of caught in a production backlog, and Tor would have had an ebook store running for months now.
And yeah, I think the multiple formats are part of the problem. Newcomers to ebooks don't want to worry about formats, they want to read books. And they certainly don't want to have to think about converting formats. It's just one more stupid obstacle to people adopting the technology.
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