Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
Nobody has said there will be no initial costs. My argument was that after the initial costs the cost per book will be similar to producing only paper versions. In this case latex2html already exists and for people that need to do a conversion it can probably be tweaked to produce good output.
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Tommy, one of the problems with mission critical enterprise systems is that they need to be maintained. I work in an environment (not publishing anymore, thank goodness!) where mid-sized organizations spend several hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in support and maintenance - and that's not including the salaries of operators or IT staff.
As to "the initial costs the cost per book will be similar to producing only paper versions," even if the software was completely free that wouldn't be true I'm afraid, because you'd still need to proof each eBook format for layout errors, add any TOC and INDEX hyperlinks, etc. Your conversion software wouldn't be able to add the links unless that data was already present in the original manuscript, of which, unfortunately, most are absent.