Quote:
Originally Posted by rkomar
I have no idea what sort of software a manuscript goes through on its way to becoming a paper book. Is it possible that the Word file gets split into two separate flows early on, and that the software for producing a typeset paper book does a lot of the spell and consistency checking? The idea that the publisher would OCR the paper copy to produce the ebook seems pretty bizarre. Although maybe that's just how they do it for backlist items, and use the same flow for new books, too. Is there anyone here in the biz who can comment?
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Well, in the olden days, books were handwritten then put into type, but nowadays of course they will use a word processor. There are a number of ways to turn a Word document into filtered html and save it as an ePUB (for instance,
Writer2ePub) and the
Atlantis Word Processor has been mentioned as a great word processor for making ePUBs. (Disclaimer: All my information comes from haunting the MobileRead forums -- I am NOT in any way involved with publishing.)
Since the manuscript came from a word document, it should be a simple matter to export this to an ePUB, assuming the author knows beforehand that he will be publishing an ebook (I should HOPE he knows) and marks the chapter headings, etc. correctly. And this doesn't help for backlisted books that don't have any digital files and must be OCR'ed when they decide to republish.
All that being so, backlisted books are understandably problematic, but HOW can an author possibly publish an ebook that has a different SPELLING from the pbook???
The formatting I understand though -- authors aren't really ready for the whole "digital stuff" thing and completely neglect to spend five minutes while writing to make sure the formatting is right. (Possibly they are like my classmate who presses enter at the end of each line because he doesn't realize paragraphs flow automatically? I've definitely seen some really bizarre split paragraphs in ebooks.)