Quote:
Originally Posted by AnemicOak
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.
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No, I'm saying that the cost depends. How much should it cost to paint my house? Unless you know a fair bit about my house and what I was looking for, you can't answer that with any accuracy and if you tried to give me a set figure without that information, I sure as heck am not going to hire you.
Great, you have a scan where you are happy with the results. Would I be happy with the results? I wouldn't know unless I actually look at them. Would some of the super picky types here be happy with the results? Same answer.
If you can scan a book, edit the results and produce an ebook that matches the formatting of the original in 17 hours, all I can say is good for you. No idea how many pages that is, but even for something like Zelazny's Jack of Shadows (142 pages) that's roughly 10 pages an hour.
It takes me a lot longer, but then again, I don't destroy the book to scan it (a lot of people will cut the pages out of the binding to be able to feed it into a fast scanner, I use a camera rig that doesn't damage the book) and I'm not a professional editor.
I find that odd formatting is the rule rather than the exception in books that I'm interested in scanning. The last book I scanned used a two column format. That took a long time to get right. Old paperbacks where the ink has blurred a bit and the paper has turned brown due to the paper used and age tend to have more scan errors that hardback books. I also find that the books I'm interested in scanning tend to be rather longer than the old 200 page pulp novels.
Do you scan 500+ ebooks a year? That's what we are actually talking about. A commercial ebook scanner that scans and edits ebooks day in and day out, not someone who does it on an occasional basis for fun. There are a number of people on this board who scan and edit books for fun. Perhaps some will chime in and say how long it takes them. I'm probably one of the slower workers here. I might be able to scan 10 pages in a hour and generate decent text, but it won't be formatted or proofed.
One of the reasons that I used the photography comparison is that it also is one of those hobbies where there are a lot of amateurs who enjoy doing it, and where some don't understand the time difference between doing it as a profession verses doing it as a hobby.