Quote:
Originally Posted by charleski
My apologies, I certainly didn't want to besmirch the reputation of the conversion services that do produce quality work, and I have seen some very impressive results from those who are truly professional.
But it's unfortunate, though true, that the 'global leader' in this business is focussed purely on churning out ebooks as fast as possible at the lowest possible price, using cheap and poorly-educated labour in India and China which allows it to offer prices that are almost an order of magnitude lower than some competitors. I won't name names, but type 'ebook conversion France' into Google....
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Oh, believe me,
I know. And I confess I might have been a bit twee about our process; I do know, though, that you are ABSOLUTELY right, that there are some scum out there, making books. (They're always looking to poach trained people, BTW). And, frankly, there are some total bunglers making them right here in the US; when I read the posts on the KDP, from purported "ebook conversion" persons, I want to scream. There was a guy charging people to make (both epub and mobi), who made all his epubs with Calibre, and had never run an epub through epubcheck, and didn't know how to fix the results when someone did. I was gobsmacked that someone would charge, with that little knowledge, and give "advice" on the forums. He's probably a really nice guy; but if you can't at least write your own ncx, and fix your own epubs, IMHO, you shouldn't be charging to
make the bloody things.
I've been trying to round up my own Crew TL's to write down their "processes" for user_none, and if it wasn't so mildly vexing, it would be laughable; they all look at me like I'm Mentally Challenged (of course...they could be right). It's "
well...we clean it, we do the elements and CSS, and put it in Sigil to finish." LOL.
So our vagueness is that we really do all the initial heavy lifting in whatever html editor each one of us likes; some of us use NTPro clips to clean; some use Epsilon and mostly use regex; one team is strictly run by a Perl Girl; and then, the one thing we ALL do, is use Sigil (and then we have three different ways that mobi's get made, too). I guess we're not very IBM around here, but it works, at least, at this volume, which is +/-150 books/month. If things keep increasing at the rate that they have the last year, that may change.
Best,
Hitch