[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Mortis

I've worked in the Publishing industry for the past 20 years and I honestly don't understand why there is a problem with the editing/fprmating of e-books, the same files used for the original p-book should be used for the e-book. I can go back through almost 20 years of material and pull out thousands of magazines that would only have to be repackaged to be sold as ebooks.

I wish it were so simple.

In many cases, older books date from times when the normal submission was a hardcopy manuscript, which was rekeyed by a typesetter for publication.

Even if the manuscript was electronic to begin with, what format was it? What reads it now? And the files for the pbook won't be the manuscript - they'll be what got sent to the printer. These days, that's a PDF generated by InDesign. Before that, stuff prepared for the printer was done in Quark eXpress. Before that, it might have been Ventura.

I look forward to the day when everyone has standardized on well formed XML as the underslying storage format, but I'm not holding my breath. It will require investment in a new toolchain, changes in existing workflow, and learning to use the new tools by those responsible for production.

While I don't work in the book publishing industry, my understanding is that it would be the same; any book in print should have the digital files to create ebooks, it's not like we are stilling using movable type.

See above. A lot of the books produced as a result of the "I'd like to read this book in a Kindle edition" button presses on Amazon don't have electronic files available. They get produced by an outsourced Indian operation who scans a hardcopy. OCRs, and packages the result as a Kindle file.

I suspect the main reason is that the publishers are trying to save some money and sending the final print out to be scanned rather than digging up the press files, or the publishes are getting their files from someone else, ie off the net? Just a thought.
If someone can explain it, I'm sure I'm not the only one thats curious as to why the formating in ebooks are such garbage (in some cases).

It's a combination of factors.

Right now, the standard workflow in publishing is that a manuscript is delivered in Microsoft Word format. This is edited, copy edited, and proofread until an approved final copy is ready. That gets imported to Adode InDesign for typesetting and markup. The output from InDesign is a PDF file that goes to the printer, who feeds it to an imagesetter that generates the plates the book will be printed from.

PDF is a poor format for most ebooks, so production of an ebook requires extra steps. (And many folks are still learning how to do that right.) InDesign can generate ePub files, but does not currently do it well enough for publication. If it did, workflow might be "Save As PDF for Printer, Save As ePub for eBook", with conversion to other ebook formats like Amazon's handled by scripted conversion.
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Dennis