Quote:
Originally Posted by Cyberman tM
In books, they must have the original - which should be digital one way or another, making a transition rather painless.
|
Publishers generally don't have a digital copy of any book that's more than a few years old. Until *very* recently, disc storage space was expensive. For corporate purposes, it was too expensive to keep a digital copy of *every single title* published, and possibly several stages of digital production. (And what format should they keep? The PDF, suitable for offset printing in a particular size only, not easily convertible to something with reflow abilities? The Pagemaker file? The Quark XPress file? The (shudder) Microsoft Works file? Some proprietary format that went out of production in 2003?)
When the book fell out of print, they deleted the digital copy. At the latest, when their contract with that author was over, they deleted the copy. If they do happen to have a digital file, they may no longer have the software that opens it, or conversion to a modern format may destroy all the formatting.
Expect any book more than 10 years old, and possibly more than 5, to need to be scanned & OCR'd for ebook production.
Quote:
|
Of course, I'm assuming that the digital original contains actual semantic information. I would find it hard to believe that things like titles and quotes and that would not be specially marked in the master copy.
|
Formatting for print is different from formatting for e-publishing. For print, they can use special fonts for the chapter headers, artistic symbols for section dividers, indent sections without semantic markup, make a single word larger-type for emphasis, and so on. If it's special formatting for that one book, they don't need to create a style or do semantic markup. They made a final print-ready PDF or postscript file that wasn't intended to convert back to another digital format.
Until 10 years ago, all digital production worked that way, and changes have been very slow for most publishers.