Quote:
Originally Posted by CazMar
With 10% unemployment in the USA (and probably almost as bad in the UK) you would think finding a few tech-savvy people to do the conversion to ebooks would be easy and reasonable cheap. You don't need a degree in computer science to do the job, it's not that technical. As most modern books would be electronically typeset these days they should have the raw data on file and anyone who can use HTML should be able to convert to EPUB or produce a PDF file.
|
Conversion of existing books is likely to be outsourced to India for cost reasons. Depending upon the age of the title, there may not
be an electronic file, and scan and convert is required.
New books are thornier. The standard publishing workflow is to get manuscripts as Word documents, do editing on those, and import final copy to Adoe InDesign for typesetting and markup. The output from InDesign is a PDF file. The printer feeds the PDF file to an imagesetter that creates the plates from which books are printed.
InDesign can also create ePub files, but currently does so poorly.
The longer term solution is to use well formed XML for markup, and XSLT to do the bulk of the translations needed for things like ebook formats. The tools exist, but are not widespread.
______
Dennis