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Originally Posted by JSWolf
I just took the Word document of Richard Herley's eBook Refuge and converted it to LRF using Book Designer. Took my maybe 10 minutes to do so.
Most books without any sort of complex formatting are rather easy to convert to eBook form from the original source document which is usually some sort of word processing document such as from Word. Now, if I want to go to Mobipocket from here, it would take maybe 15-20 min.
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Jon, I don't think that's a representative illustration. When I gave you my files of The Chaos Chronicles for conversion to LFR, I had already spent many, many hours preparing those files so that they'd be in proper shape for conversion. And even at that, I didn't proofread them as thoroughly as I should have, as witness the number of errors that were brought to my attention after they were up. (And I just heard from a reader--there are still some in there!) I've just finished proofing the basic text file of another book to go into production at ereads, and that was as time-consuming as, say, correcting proofs of a book going to press. (Meaning, it was more than several full days of work on my part.) And that was just to give them a clean RTF file.
One thing not mentioned yet is that standard manuscript format for editing purposes is not the same as the format you want for ebooks. (Or for pbooks, for that matter.) Maybe that, too, will change. But right now, you can't take a typical author's Word file and just feed it into conversion software. Not unless you want crappy ebooks.