Quote:
Originally Posted by dharh
There are like a hundred books id love to see done in ebook, but its the publishers that need to get their stuff together, not really the authors.
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It's both.
In the case of Harry Potter, the hold up is J. K. Rowling, who won't authorize an electronic edition.
Tor is finally releasing ebooks of the Wheel of Time series, but that had to wait for someone (Pablo Defendini when he was at Tor.com, I believe), to convince his widow Harriet to allow it. Robert Jordan was opposed to ebook releases.
And some books are more of a challenge than others. As mentioned, it's (relatively) easy to create an ebook from a Word file, though things could be better there. Right now, everyone submits Word documents as manuscripts. After editing, copy editing, and proofreading, the final version goes to DTP and is imported to InDesign for typesetting and markup. The output from InDesign is a PDF, which goes to a printer as input to the imagesetter that creates the plates the book will be printed form.
InDesign can also output to ePub, but does so poorly. Good ePub requires well formed XML as input, and the tools are only beginning to appear in publisher's work flows.
My personal hope is further improvement to InDesign, so creating an ebook is simple as Save As ePub operation once the typesetting and markup is complete. ePub has all the content and metadata, and can be the source for other ebook formats if desired through automated conversion.
The biggest issue is books written before Word and InDesign were what everyone used. In some cases, there may no
be an electronic manuscript to start from, and producing an ebook will requires scanning a hard copy and correcting the attendant errors.
(Think of the Kindle editions produced that way, where scanning was done, but editing/proofreading
wasn't, to the loud displeasure of the buyers.)
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Dennis