Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
So how much would a low-wage ePub editor make doing this?
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@JSWolf: Let me put it to you this way, without getting into the specifics of my business--which aren't the business of anyone here--whatever you think it might be, it patently isn't enough (and trust me: it's more than you think). I've fired more epub "editors" than I like to think about. Part of it, amusingly enough, is that the html editors get pissed off at the authors, who tend to be pissy in their proof sheets. It would be funny if it didn't cause me so much agita. I can't tell you how many ePUBs I've had to edit myself because I daren't let the Crews see the nasty comments from the authors--almost always about errors that they (the authors)
themselves made, and blame on my Crews, or because they don't know a hard return from a ball return.
If I may--the reason that some of you are struggling with "how easy" it would be to single-source this (go from final "print" source to epub to mobi, etc.) is because, quite bluntly, you don't do this for a living, and thus, don't know what really happens when print is involved. This is not a criticism; it's a statement. In the print world (and we do POD PDF's), what really happens is, many of the things that get changed are only visible, and knowable, and hence fixable, when the book is put into print format. For example, if you are almost any author being legacy-published, and the print formatter ends up with a chapter with an orphaned 5 words, dangling precipitously onto an horrifyingly blank page, there's no magic stick that fixes that. At RH, they pick up the phone, call the author, and tell him/her to lose 5 words--or have the "real" editor (not typing editor) do it. Have a sentence that, heavens forfend, has a normally-hyphenated word that then hyphenates syallabically in the second word? You have the author or editor add a word or two...or take one or two out. Hyphenation takes a looong time to do--if you're going to do it correctly. Doing it crappily takes minutes. And making it look decent means a modicum of rewriting--by
somebody.
Hence...the print book is
now different than the source; and we're back at square one. We convert PDF's, from printers, all the time; and those make for very good ebooks. We convert Office and OO all the time, too; and Wordperfect, although less nowadays; these only make as good an ebook as the effort that was put in, in the first place; GIGO, as we all know too well. This is precisely why--although it was counterintuitive to us, initially, ('cuz we be nerds, not publishers) to do it this way--we do POD first, THEN we export the final "source" and make the ebooks--because we learned the "stuff you can't see 'til you lay it out" issue the hard way.
I'm not, as I said earlier, taking sides in this argument, which I think is a no-win scenario, as some people will choose to believe that publishers are heinous, money-grubbing bastards who are hosing the consumer, and should be expending more of their filthy lucre to perfect the ebooks (although their various and sundry financial statements don't seem to be supporting that position); and then there's those just seeking info; and then there are those who've made books of all kinds, digital and paper, and have varied perspectives.
If legacy publishers are getting "full-boat" for their ebooks, then, I concur; they should be putting out the same quality of ebook that they do print book. I've noted, however, that--for what it's worth--there seems to be a larger constituency of ebook readers who complain about typos than there are print book readers (and I do know this first-hand, from our POD categories--precisely the same book, as our process is absolutely geared to single-source). So: is the problem as large as we think it is...or is it the (apparently) greater number of voices raised that make it seem so? Or is it simply numbers, in that a $2.99 ebook will sell more copies than a $12.99 hardcover, or...?
It's an interesting question.
And, just for s&g's, I've asked several clients if I may use some of their pages here, for demonstration purposes (I do not know if I will obtain permission)--these clients had scan & OCR. I'm asking them if I may post 1-2 original pages from a PDF, and the resulting RAW scanned output; one book is older--20 years-ish; the other is newer, mid-to-late 90's--and if they give me permission I'll post it. I don't think most people know what raw scanned output (other than the proofers at PD) really looks like, and I think it could be useful for everyone, at least for the OCR portion of the discussion. IF I get permission.
HTH in our gracious,
genteel cogitations on the topic,
Hitch