Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
But, if the book has no special formatting and the Word file has all the changes made to it since the last edit and is the same as the printed copy, then I see no problem tossing it into Book Designer and producing an eBook for the Sony with little effort.
In this day and age, I am surprised it's not all digital. If it was, making eBooks would be a lot easier with less effort and more return for the money.
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But most writers' Word files
don't have the final editing changes in them, because until now there's been little reason to go to that extra work. Plus, there's a whole slew of things that have to be changed from manuscript format to book format: em-dashes, paragraphs tabs, underline to italic, proper centering (which doesn't always hold with conversion), sorting out Word "styles" which can be very useful to a writer but which can screw up the conversion, extra spaces, straight quotes to curly quotes (if you care), etc.
I agree that it should be made simple to take the
typesetter's output and convert that. But it isn't--yet. I hope it will be soon.
In the last week, people not on this board have pointed out about half a dozen typos still in the Neptune Crossing ebooks. (#@$%$#@!) I'm debating whether it's worth the effort to go in and fix them. I'm thinking not--because it'll take hours to redo all the conversions, plus trying to get corrected versions to manybooks, feedbooks, and Baen Free Library. I hate
not fixing something, but that would be a poor use of my time, I think.
I still think ebooks should be priced as low as possible, but not because making them is simple.