Quote:
Originally Posted by fastesthamster
Are you trying to say that publishers do not already have a digital copy of a book? And they would have to spend the same amount every time they wanted to publish a new book? Seriously?
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From what I understand, they sometimes have PDF's or other formats that are not easy to convert into HTML, ePub, mobi and so forth. Especially things like TOC's and tables are rather fussy. It's complex enough that commercial services are available for the conversion; and at least one MR poster (I forget who) does it for a living.
More importantly, there are millions of backlist titles that don't have an electronic format at all -- e.g. anything written before, say, 1990. In which case, you need to find a completed copy, OCR it, fix the OCR, and format it.
Publishers don't always do a good job with their conversions, but for commercial purposes you often need to do a
little more than just run it through Calibre.