Quote:
Originally Posted by sadievan
I have a question.
If Topaz is so bad, which I'm not doubting, why do the publishers use it? Is it cheaper/easier for them?
Carol
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The reason it is used is that true "electronic" descriptions of many older or esoteric titles (like my obscure history books on WWII tanks) never existed or no longer existed.
Without an computer file in some readable form you can not easily be make epubs or mobis. So instead of scanning and OCRing the book *and* then painfully correcting the errors to make an ebook which would be very expensive, they instead generate a glyph based layout description of each page (taking up less space than what a jpeg of each page would consume) that can be partially "reflowed" and where the OCR need not be perfect since it will be only used for "searching" inside the book. This saves them many hours (and $) of proofreading and correcting, while not taking up the space of an image only pdf, and while allowing for some form of reflow. This also allows them to grow their library of offered books (especially of the back catalog) very quickly
Ingenious really!
I only buy Topaz books when no epub or mobi is available, but I am glad at least some version of these more obscure or special interest older books are available.
If I were Amazon, I would ask people to use these Tools and do the proofreading of the book and submit cleaned up html based versions back to Amazon in exchange for a free ebook - or something like that.