Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
If they were a quality company, they wouldn't charge 30-50¢ per page... 
That is only enough money to buy you the convenience of not having to install calibre and watch the progress wheel spin yourself. Like mrmikel said. |
First, my sincere thanks to both @AnemicOak and @eschwartz for remembering me.
Now, seglare80: I don't know what type of source materials you have, so I can't speak to whether or not $1-$1.50/page is a good or crap price. Without knowing more, it's impossible to say.
If you're providing them with Word (or word-processing of any kind) files, and they're not very complicated, that seems QUITE high. OTOH, if those are exceedingly complex books--tons of bulleted, numbered lists, images, tables, lots of clean-up, maybe it's a decent price.
However, I must tell you,
$0.30/page is scraping the bottom of even the Indian barrel; most companies there start around that price for converting even Word files (per page) to ePUB, never mind something more complex. The average price for a moderate ePUB page is $0.65-$0.80, and more for complex pages. IN India.
I recall that I had a company in Russia that send me some PDF pages to quote; when I returned the pricing, they were incensed, and informed me that they demanded pricing of $0.10/page. When I got done laughing, I told them to download Calibre, so-long and so-luck.
I've seen companies--a LOT of them--that charge prices at/near ours, and invariably, I get their ePUB product from (unhappy) customers who ask us to "fix" the book, and, sure enough, when I open the ePUB, I'm faced with a boatload of Calibre-named Styles. I have told the story here often of the guy who ripped the elderly man off for $6K for a print "and ebook" project, who used Calibre to make two ebooks, who knew so little that he didn't even know that having each sentence as a paragraph was "bad." This isn't Calibre's fault; it's the fault of people who think that ebook-formatting is clicking a button. It's not, as the regulars here know.
There are a lot of
uber-bad converters out there. I agree with the others; for that type of money, use Calibre and edit it yourself, or buy AWP and make it that way. I haven't seen $0.10/$0.30/page from PDF (or even from Word) even from the new Chinese or Indonesian companies. And certainly not from any Indian companies. You can try Fiverr, I suppose. There are certainly a lot of faux-Mobi converters there working for $5, and if it doesn't work out, it's not a lot of money.
Best of luck to you,
Hitch