Quote:
Originally Posted by starrigger
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.
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If you want to pass on the corrections, I'll fix up the LRF editions that I created. I don't mind at all.
I do agree that it should be a simple matter of taking the final electronic copy and converting it so it can then be imported into whatever programs are going to be used for the differing eBook formats. It's crazy that in this day and age, we cannot do that.