Quote:
Originally Posted by DaleDe
They have or had electronic copies of the pages. They have a stack of electronic copies after several reviews and no body really knows which ones are the latest and which ones go with what. In addition they tend to throw them away once a master is made. They may have a PDF with all the crop marks on it but that is all.
Dale
|
Thanks for the insight. My last review of a technical book was about five years ago, and they e-mailed me a "final" copy. There could have been minor changes afterward. But that was a book co-written by two technically proficient authors 3,000 miles apart, so naturally it had to stay in electronic form till the end.
Since there is value in having a proper "source code control" of the electronic version, the question to the publishers is why don't they manage the process correctly, keeping one electronic copy as the master, forking at the last moment to the two products, eBook and paper. With their current process of throwing away the electronic copy, they throw away money (equal to the cost of converting back to eBook form). I think that is what many of us in this thread can't fathom.