Quote:
Originally Posted by sun surfer
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?
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How do you know exactly what the publishers do? Either kind.
What I know is unless there is a demand, big business is not going to waste their time and money.
On the small publishers, you don't have a clue if they got an electronic copy or scanned it themselves.
You are assuming that a person is a fake unless they are employed by a big company.
I mean all publishers.
Now seriously, your best bet is read the one star reviews.
What do you consider a fake publisher? Those are not fake books. I do not appreciate you calling the volunteers here fakes. People spend many hours getting these books ready for public consumption.
On the big publishers, except for Scholastic and Harcourt, there is NO money in public domain. Do you have $600 per book to check for errors? That is the minimum it would cost any publisher. Yes, big business watches costs or they wouldn't be in business.
Time and money are the reasons they don't do it.
If you want to separate the wheat from chaff, take several hours and go through every book of that title.
That is really the only way.
And as far as the big publishers go, they still have OCR errors.
Do not ever tell a poster NOT to join a discussion or ask why they joined the discussion.
If you don't like an opinion, fine. Put the person on ignore or report the post.
Do not call out that poster because that violates the forum guidelines.
Many people here take the time to make sure we do have decent public domain books, do not call them fakes or say it costs nothing.
Do you work for pennies an hour or your spouse?
Then why do you think publishers should?
You want a perfect book, it doesn't exist.