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Originally Posted by elcreative
Have you actually offered your services to any publishers??? ... it's also a mind-numbingly boring job that tends to ruin any enjoyment in the work being dealt with. It's one thing doing a few to get some PD work out in a different form but quite another if you end up doing it full time...
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I've done it full time; I love it. Very few companies of any sort are willing to hire OCR correction & doc formatting specialists. They believe that machine OCR is plenty good enough, all customer complaints to the contrary. Also, a lot of the OCR correction can be sent to typists in India who work much, much cheaper than US employees.
Publishers don't have the budget to hire people to format the *entire* backlist they intend to produce; they don't have any numbers to indicate that they'd make enough extra in sales to justify those. And they have no interest in hiring one or two people; they'd only consider it if they had a budget and workflow process that worked on a large scale. Smaller publishers, who are happy to hire people to convert older books, do so piecemeal rather than having steady work.