Quote:
Originally Posted by kso
This is probably a very naive question: but why do people give you PDFs to work from, don't they have their own copy (or copy they have rights to) in a "reasonable" file format?
klaus
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Nah, not naive. I'd have asked it too, a decade ago before I learned the (very) hard way. Authors have pdfs, that previous publishers made for them, or Authorhouse, or Createspace, or, or or. Or they paid a print layout person, who only gave them PDFs as the final product, and didn't give them the INDD package files. Or they were made with Quark--I still see this, today, frequently from Ireland, as it happens, and eastern Europe. Or, they created a pdf using Powerpoint, or AI, or whatever. Using the native Powerpoint files, or adobe illustrator, isn't going to be better than using a PDF. I see these types of files
daily.
OR, (this slays me), they had a book in print, and they had it scanned by some bozo--a friend, or a copyshop, and you'd be appalled at how many times, TODAY, we get COPIES, not scans, so there's no text layer. I will bet you I see this 1-2x monthly.
Example: I had a client, who was trade pubbed. She wanted a quote to have her 3 books scanned, OCRed, cleaned, put into print layouts and eBooks. We gave her a quote which IMHO, was fairly cheap. (I mean...if you include competent scanning, proofing, cleanup). She decided it was too expensive. She had a local Kinkos, or whatever, "scan" the pages--and they were copies, not scans, albeit, saved to PDF with a text layer. (Truly, one of the MOST appalling scanning jobs I've ever seen. She kept going on and on about what a GREAT job they'd done, and I finally told her, "look, I'm sorry, I'm glad that you're happy with those folks and their efforts, but this scanning job is dreadfully poor quality." I'm 99% sure that at the time, she didn't believe me, thought I was trying to have her spend money she didn't
need to with a high-quality scanner like Golden Images.) The quality was
horrendous, and I mean, blurry, crooked, etc.
She decided she was going to DIY, right? So she started copy-pasting the text, from the "PDF" copy to Word. Within a very short time, she was in
TEARS--missing text, weird formatting, all the usual crap, right?
And, of course, EVERY line ends in a soft return, as well. She can't figure out why she can't make the text justify! She finally gave up and sent us the "pasted" Word files, which we're cleaning up and formatting/laying out.
NOW, she thinks that what she was quoted was
cheap--it took her MONTHS (from the 3rd week in July, until 10 days ago--about the 15th of July) to paste, review, etc., ONE BOOK. One book! Nearly 110 days, to do ONE. Now, what she was quoted looks pretty damn reasonable. Funny how that works.
But, you can't tell people what's involved with it; they simply don't believe you. I mean, it's all done
FOR you, right? You just "save to Word" and Bob's-yer-uncle, nothin' hard 'bout that! (Like people that think that they can upload any POS to the KDP and "it makes an eBook for you!")
You can't tell people, they have to try it themselves to figure out how hard it is to actually DO and do right. {shrug}. As with all things, it looks easy to anyone who's never had to do it.
And of course--there are
also those people whom you stare at, wondering "have you ever
SEEN a book?" They send you their DIY efforts, saying "I
just need you to add a TOC," and the thing is godawful. (n.b.: we don't do that type of work, either working "in" Word or fixer-uppers.) For print, no running heads, no page numbers, unjustified, spacing between first-line-indented paragraphs, and so on and so on. Mind-boggling, really. Don't people bother to even read blog posts, from places like TheBookDesigner, to see what a book should
LOOK LIKE,
before they hit the publish button?
BOGGLING.
Hitch