Quote:
Originally Posted by DaleDe
I guess you never worked in IT. There is always changes to deal with in software. It is never just automatic and then forget it. New versions have to be tested and integrated. Workarounds have to be revised. Source documents may even need changing.
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Wrong guess. About 25 years worth of IT in one form or another, starting on IBM mainframes running OS/VS1 and MVS, and working down though DEC PDP-11s runnig RSTS-E and RSX-11M+, DEC VAXen running VMS, IBM PCs and an assortment of other things. These days I'm mostly a Solaris guy, with Linux in the mix. (A Sunfire X100 server is sitting under my monitor, with a background project to get Solaris 10 up on it and add it to my network.)
Yes, there are software changes, but those are part of what IT does. The point was that once you build the pipeline and automate the work flow, it's built.
The hard part is getting it all set up correctly in the first place. Maintenance should be a relatively minor effort. The point is that using ePub as the master format, and supporting Mobi, Sony LRF, etc. as output formats done by automatic conversion shouldn't be enough extra work to make it infeasible.
It doesn't even have to be done by the publisher. There are third party editorial production houses that do that sort of thing as a service.
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Dennis