Quote:
Originally Posted by jj2me
Authors submit manuscripts in ASCII, right? . . . Conversion, absent DRM, takes what, a few days?
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The day I receive an author's manuscript in ASCII will be the first day in the 25 years I have been in publishing that such an event will have occurred. Authors usually submit their manuscripts in a MS Word document that is riddled with styles and formatting -- usually haphazardly done. At least for the books on which I work, cleanup takes a lot of time. Then the manuscript has to be edited and recoded to conform to the codes needed to produce the final version of the book.
I'll admit I do not work on novels and there may be less involved -- or not -- with that genre, but the nonfiction books I work on take several weeks worth of work to prepare a manuscript for publication. The process is not as cut and dried as some would make it to be.
I, too, think prices for ebooks with DRM are too high but I also think that the pricing would be fine if there were no DRM. In other words, a leased product is worth significantly less to me than an owned product. To me, it is DRM that is the bugaboo in the mix.