[shalym]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Hum. Let me give an example. Back before there were all the ebook stores around, there were only a couple of publishers who did ebooks. Thus, if you wanted to read books on your computer, the only real choice was the fan scanned copies that were passed around on the various usenet mailing list. I still have a couple of hundred sitting around from that time period. Naturally, most of the books were either big name authors or authors who were popular at the time. Most fan scanned books had multiple revisions. Basically, several people would scan the book and put it up. Then someone else would take the scan and make corrections. Someone else would take that and make corrections and so on. Over time, some of the books were pretty well edited, at least as far as scanning errors and the such go.

Most of Roger Zelazny's books were available that way and I still have them. I also have all the Zelazny books that are currently available through the various ebook stores. One of those books is Jack of Shadows, one of my favorites. I also have an old paper version of the book.

When I compare the fan generated Jack of Shadows with the professionally done version that I got via Amazon, there is a big difference. As I said, the fan version doesn't have any noticeable typos and the words are all there, but the formatting is off. It's just not as aesthetically pleasing as the Amazon version. Looking at the paper version, it's not all that aesthetically pleasing either. There isn't nearly enough white space. I assume they were trying to save paper. So certainly, one could say that the fan scanned ebook is as good as the original paper, but it doesn't really hold up to the aesthetics of the professionally produced version.

It's a bit like producing a really well done web page. Anyone can put together a competent web page in a few hours, but a real quality web page that draws attention takes days of work with a lot of fiddling around. There very much is an art to it.

That is what I'm talking about. Yes, you can generate a reasonable ebook in short period of time these days (the OCR software is much, much better than even 5 years ago), but generating what I consider a professional quality ebook takes a bit more work. Certainly having something available in ebook is better than hot having it, but I can tell a big difference between the ebooks that were generated as quickly and cheaply as possible, with the ones were the time was taken to make them as aesthetically pleasing as possible. It's a bit like the difference between a pulp paperback and a really well done hardback.

Some people don't care about that sort of thing. All I can say is that the reason I have a lot of hard back books isn't just because of the ability to get it early, it's also that for me, a well done hardback is more enjoyable to read, and not just because the font size of the text is bigger.

Ok, so that's your rationale. For me, all I really care about is the words. Then again, I'm one who always would have rather read the paperback than the hard cover...mostly because I could fit it into my purse or my pocket. Portability has *always* been more important than how pretty it looks, to me. Of course, these days it actually causes *pain* to hold a hardcover book for too long, but that wasn't as much of a consideration back in the day.

Shari