Quote:
Originally Posted by L.J. Sellers
I know several people who produce great epub and mobi files for less than $100 per book. If I can find an inexpensive professional, why can't a publisher hire someone similar? I think it's more about not being committed to producing a quality product because e-books are still an afterthought for most publishers.
L.J.
The Sex Club, $.99!
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I suspect you're right about the second part. From the description of this particular book problem, it sounded like a bad scan and OCR of an older book for which there was no digital file. You're not going to make quality ebooks from old paperbacks for $100/book, at least not on a mass-market scale. The proofreading alone is going to cost more than that. According to one of my publishers (well, as of a few years ago), it cost maybe a thousand to do a good conversion from a paper book.
So, is that a reason to do a shoddy job? No. But my sense is that publishers with large backlists of paper books they want to convert have yet to develop an economical and reliable way to do it. I think they want to, but they don't want it badly enough. Yet.