[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

So you are telling me that someone who already has a digital file, converts it to a different format, and then redigitizes it using OCR? Oh man.

Yes. That's what I'm telling you. Because they have a routine, standard stylesheet that they use to parse the AbbyyFineReader HTML output. It's rote. It's not the type of conversion that we do. They find employees, train them to do X every time--EVERY time, no exceptions--and they have real problems dealing with anything outside of the box.

Didn't Einstein say: "There are two things that are infinite: The universe, and human stupidity." ?

Indeed.

They *could* try to charge by word. What if the PDF has really large fonts? You pay more for the same book.

We've had this come up, in-house. I charge by the Word count, plus add-ons for cleanup (90% of the time), images, text elements (lists, yadda) and the like. But I know of several higher-end conversion houses like mine that charged by "the page" for ages. I was always a bit gobsmacked by that, because of course, someone could use 8pt font in Word or whatever and send you 200K words on "400 pages." Y'know. But then I realized that one of them, one of the most well-known, was actually sourcing his/her Word fiction files out to India, and thus, the "per page" rates. {sigh}. Even back then, I was getting my pants beat off by "US Conversion houses" shipping stuff to India, when all my fiction was being made here (North America, as we have folks in CAN also). Guess where Amazon-made MOBI's are made????? That authors buy through Createspace? Hmmmmmmmmmm? And, yes, I know this factually.

It seems everybody is of the opinion:

Production -> China.
IT -> India.
Clothing -> Bangladesh.

I've actually found using India for any IT kind of frustrating. Yes, their rates are cheaper. However, there's a requirement for massive added supervision (which obviously costs more than labor, usually) at the US end, and a LOT more QA, ditto. Frankly, in my experience in contracting out everything from web work to whatever, it doesn't end up really being cheaper, unless you don't care if you get substandard work, not because the Indians want to do substandard work, but because a) there is a language barrier, b) there's a culture issue, and c) they tend to use the cheapest, least-skilled labor unless you raise holy hell about it. Oh, and d) they are culturally inculcated to always say "yes," they know how to do something, when they don't. They don't think of it as lying; in India, it means "yes, I don't know now, but I will learn on this how to do this just perfectly to make you 100% happy." In the US, of course, if someone tells you that they know how to do something, you expect them to mean NOW, not when they're done experimenting on you.

I just lost a gig to Aptara yesterday, for a one-off book (so I'm not that upset), but I asked this guy, the author, if he'd asked Aptara how they were going to handle all his "exceptions" inside the MOBI file, as the book has Greek, Cyrillic texts and fonts, inline, and other items that will require special care. Not to mention, 200+ photographs, which I KNOW they are going to slap in there at 72ppi, which means all those photos will look like dog-poo on the HDX and Fire HD devices, due to their high screen rez. It's so frustrating. Their quote was about...70%?-ish of what mine would have been, but I'm running into this more and more.

I think I said, somewhere here on MR (maybe not) that if you use a lot of keyword tools, it's easy to discover that around the phrase, "ebook conversion services," the MOST searched for full phrase is "ebook conversion services India." Not FREE, not "cheap," not anything else: INDIA. Now ask me how my mood is today?

And youse guys wonder why I'm a cranky old thing. ;-)

H