Quote:
Originally Posted by Cinisajoy
First they have to buy the book, then they have to buy a scanner, then an OCR reader, then they have to take at least 2 hours to scan the book, then run it through the OCR, and then take about 30 hours to proofread and correct before even uploading.
Not to mention making sure any forward, preface and notes are also in public domain.
So while it may not "cost" much after the initial equipment and software purchases, it is still very time consuming. And with so many free classics, it would be very hard to make any money.
|
I think you are referring to the professionally done ones mentioned in the post you quoted and not the fake publishers I mentioned in the post you didn't quote. Either way, I think you are mistaken. For the professional publishers' transfers of their public domain pbooks to ebook:
-they wouldn't have to buy their own book as they'd already have it
-they would already have the equipment to scan in the book including the scanner and OCR reader (and anyway, do you really think big publishers would be worrying about the cost of buying this equipment?)
-the forwards, prefaces and notes would be the same as the ones from their pbook so (and I'm not an expert here but this seems likely) the only legal work to do if any would be the proper transfer of their content rights to the digital realm
That only leaves the proofreading, and we all know how well the big publishers make sure to proofread their ebook versions beforehand. But even factoring in paying the proofreader and whoever's doing the labour of the transfer, then having an ebook that is almost pure profit would surely eventually make that upfront expense up at some point.
Really, I'm not even sure why you decided to discuss this point. If, on the other hand, you meant the fake publishers' versions, well, those people just take some electronic version already out there, slap an amateur cover and 'something' else to have Amazon let it stay ('annotated', a public domain picture, whatever, but usually very amateurishly and quickly done and taken from some other easily findable source), and put it up for sale to try to make a quicky scam buck. There are a very, very few semi-professional ebook publishers of public domain books that try to make more of a quality version worth paying for (such as a huge omnibus proofread and well formatted) compared to a free download from places like here or gutenberg, but even those can have errors and problems and probably also start from an already-online source. Would you care to explain what exactly you meant by your post?