Quote:
Originally Posted by Jellby
So they produce the ebook edition from the paper edition, so there's no reason why the cost of producing the paper edition should be transferred to the ebook price (it was already included in the paper price), so the ebook price should reflect only the cost of one single paper book (i.e., divided among all the ebooks expected to be sold), plus the cost of scanning and creating the ebook (plus electronic distribution, author rights, etc.), but it should specifically not include the cost of correcting proofs, editing, etc.  |
Unfortunately, scanning an e-book also leads to errors, so you still need editing/proofing of all material. A recent e-copy of the
Hitchhiker's Guide series I purchased was filled with over a dozen instances of the same error, an improperly-recognized set of characters generated by OCR, that a proofer should have caught (not to mention other OCR errors, but the one recurring error was particularly noticeable after the third instance).
Actually, there are ways of improving the accuracy of OCR (such as xeroxing a printed page and enlarging it to the size of a letter or A4 page, and running scan and OCR on the larger pages... I've done it, it works), but few scanning personnel want to take even that extra step for accuracy. The Hitchhiker's errors I mentioned above would have been caught by this method.