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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So in other words you're saying you don't know. Since you told nabsltd that they grossly underestimated the time it takes to produce a professional quality eBook I thought maybe you had some actual numbers and/or experience.
The time example I gave was for a book scanned from a crappy 1950's mass market paperback which as I said got a lot more editing care than I'm sure most do (as I said, going page by page and proofing against the original). Novels aren't something that generally require tons of illustrations or special formatting, although I'm well aware of what kind of formatting can be involved as I've been producing print books. magazines, etc. for over 20 years.