Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
It depends on the work being scanned (size, illustrations and quality of print), your toleration for error and how picky you are with regards to formatting. Do you expect just text, or all the special formatting from the original. Bare bones scanning that one might get from India, or via a pirate site is pretty quick.
Something that is a close approximation of the original printed book, with all the illustrations in the right place, etc. can take a lot longer. Some books use different fonts for different purposes (example, some authors like to use italics for things like telepathic communication verse normal speech). Many books will use a special font for the first letter of a chapter. Add in the correct spacing between paragraphs and chapters.
Plus, you have to consider what kind of shape the original is in. An old paperback that is 40 or 50 years old? Add in the issue with SF&F of having a lot of words that don't appear in a normal dictionary. I think you can see how the various complications can add up.
Heck, even a simple conversion from az3 to epub in Calibre can lose a lot of formatting in some ebooks that I have.
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You're taking special cases and treating them as if they are true for the vast majority of books. For example, are Asimov's Black Widowers books chock full of illustrations? Are the use of drop caps going to make or break sales of the book? Italics and special words can be handled by a proof-reading of the text.
The proof of this is in the indie/self-published back list books from yesteryear. They usually sell for under five bucks and they aren't littered with one star reviews.
And, again, my friend that works on novelizations relies on mass market paperbacks that are thirty to forty years old. He picks them up at used bookshops, so these aren't pristine collectables he's scanning. He still manages to put out books that could be sold as retail if it weren't for the complicated licensing issues.
Putting out an e-book shouldn't be a shoddy thing. But it isn't the minefield you are describing either.