Quote:
Originally Posted by taming
I know this is a minority opinion, but once reading electronically became my first choice--that is, I no longer would choose a paperback or hardcover tree book when an eBook was available--the value of the digi content goes up for me. I understand that the financial cost to the publisher is less, but it then becomes a commodity like many others, one in which the cost to produce the product hasn't got a whole lot to do with the sale price. The missing piece is that the quality of the books is often not there in terms of how they display.
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That last is a problem with several sources.
One increasingly affects
all books. When a book is prepared for publication, there are steps involved in copy editing and proofreading to produce a clean, error free manuscript that can be turned into a published book. These steps are increasingly
not done, to cut costs, in an apparent belief that a pass through a spell checker suffices.
A second is that ebooks are not part of the standard work flow, and the ebook must have additional production. The standard practice in almost all publishers is that the original manuscript is a Word document. The document goes through the edit/copy edit/proofread process to produce a final approved manuscript. That document is imported into Adobe InDesign for typesetting and markup. The output from InDesign is a PDF file. The printer feeds the PDF file to an imagesetter to produce the plates from which the books are printed.
PDF files are problematic as ebooks, as many devices can't display them, and many PDFs are designed for a larger screen than the average reading device has, aren't coded to allow the viewer to reflow it to fit the screen if the device
has PDF viewing capability, and may have layout you don't
want to reflow as the result would be hash.
The ebook world is settling on a standard format, and an assortment exist, with MobiPocket, used by the Amazon Kindle and Kindle app,) and ePub, used by the current Sony Readers and Barnes and Noble nooks among others having the largest usage. To produce those requires extra steps.
Adobe InDesign is slowly acquiring ePub compatibility, and current versions can output to an ePub file, but don't do it very well. To do good ePub, you really need to start with well formed XML, but tools to do that are not widespread in publishing.
If InDesign gets better support for ePub, some problems will lessen, as once a document has been marked up, it can be "Save As PDF" for the printer, and Save As ePub" for the ebook. ePub contains the necessary data and metadata, so it's possible to do a scripted conversion of the ePub file to other formats like Mobi. Ebooks can become part of the standard workflow.
Until that day arrives, ebooks are an extra step a lot of publishers are still learning how to do properly.
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Dennis