Quote:
Originally Posted by speakingtohe
My understanding is that it takes two weeks to a month for a meticulous person to scan, proof and format a 200 page book. I could be way of base here and scanning and OCR are much improved since I tried it 20 years ago,
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Scanning takes literally minutes per book, if one is allowed to destroy the original. (I'm assuming "chop the spine off" counts as destruction.)
OCR software is much better now. And while good formatting takes substantial time, and so does a line-by-line proof, a read-through proof by a competent editor shouldn't take more than a few hours for a 200-page book--maybe 1 day if it's troublesome, has a lot of unique names or specialized terminology.
A really careful proof would indeed take many days; a proof pass that would catch errors on the title page, repeated uses of "tlie" for "the" (common OCR error for some fonts), and line-break errors, would not.