[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Hitch

BTW: the "beta reader" idea--I have authors that would kill for reliable beta readers. Beta readers are, Keryl, one of those generally-accepted, vaguely conceptualized ideas of "things that exist" that, quite bluntly, don't.

When the authors come out of a fanfic background, they generally have (and can find new) beta readers.

And, btw: most of the beta readers are fine for plotline development, but they're not proofers.

Depends on the beta. I know how to contact plot betas, SPAG betas, Britpick betas, historical-detail betas, and various other "read your book & check for errors" people.

(And farm out proofing to India? No. Trust me on this.) And lastly--for those of you that think that proofing is easy, I'd recommend you try it. Particularly, try it with a book you hate. Or a writer who sucks--not somebody whose book you can't wait to put your hands on.

I've done proofing for books I hate. While detailed, careful proofing is tedious (and therefore expensive), a basic "read the first 10 pages and use a search-and-replace to fix the errors you can tell are going to run rampant through this book" would improve a *lot* of commercial ebooks created from scans.

Books have been released with gross errors on the title page. This is not "we can't afford detailed proofing for a small sideline part of the business" (and nevermind that ebooks are rapidly becoming the main part of some businesses); it's "can't be arsed to assign a single human being the job of glancing at the finished product before we ship it out."

*That* they could afford. Assigning someone to open the book, confirm that the title/author/publisher info is accurate (wouldn't want a typo in the publisher's name, right?), that the TOC does what they want it to, and that the reader won't get five pages into it and say, ugh, can't read this; never buying another book like this again.

I'm not seeing anyone argue that publishers REALLY MUST provide the line-by-line proof for ebooks that they do for pbooks (although, given that they charge about the same price, that does seem reasonable), but that they should flip through the book, one readable screen at a time, to see if any awful errors get in the way of reading the story.

Most of the problems come from publishers' assumptions that they don't need to adjust their workflow at all to develop a new line of products, which is baffling.

Layout-format ready-for-print files are indeed cluttered with markup and other details--but a system to take that file & convert to HTML or XML suitable for ebook import would be a lot less work than running the ebook version through another round of proofreaders (and getting a *different* batch of errors caught.) And one decent programmer should be able to write a script/program that converts all the standard markup language to the simplified HTML used for most commercial ebook production (leading and kerning are generally dropped; chapters don't need to start 1/4 of the way down the page, and so on); that's a one-time expense, with a small update every time the software changes, rather than an ongoing cost for every book.

But they don't want that; they want to take the final PDF and throw it into Calibre and call the export-to-mobi & epub their official ebook versions. Or they want to take FineReader's auto-OCR results and use them.

And they want to charge slightly more to half-again what paperbacks cost for that product. THAT'S the real sticking point; if they charged $3 for their ebooks while selling paper for $8, there'd be a lot less complaints. Since they want the same profit from ebooks as pbooks, we figure they can put the same level of effort into it.