Quote:
Originally Posted by pshrynk
What was the original comment? I can't seem to get a handle on where, exactly your concern lies.
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You did not miss much pshrynk. Even when given an answer if it was not one cmbs wanted, she dismissed it as being off-point of failing to understand her unique insight on the issue. Only those responses that agreed with her secret agenda were deemed appropriate.
As one who has posted 10 books in one day (and each of them in multiple formats) on the MobileRead site, it was the end product of a long workflow involving many tools over a period. I did not start and finish ten books in one day resulting in thirty postings.
There is a major difference between preparing a text for publication and creating that text originally. I realize that this is covering old ground for you; but there are other readers out there that may find this interesting. The time spent in preparation has a direct relationship to the quality of the base text. While it is true that many high quality texts are available fro Project Gutenberg, many of their texts also require extensive editing. (As an aside, HarryT has made thousands of corrections to some of the Dickens’ novels. That’s thousands per book, not for the series.)
Many of their common problems are simple to repair – such as a paragraph break in the middle of a sentence. Often there are the remaining artifacts of OCR scanning such as a “c” where an “e” should be. Other times there will be the one word used where another was intended such as where/wear, to/too/two, or clog/dog. Some sources are edited to remove “objectionable” material such as some of the sources Patricia encountered and reinserted the original form of the book before posting at MobileRead.
Sometimes you work with your own scans or scans from sources such as the Internet Archive. In those cases, I have performed the OCR, cleaned the text and then formatted. For example, several volumes of the Harvard Classics and Augustine’s City of God were prepared that way.
Once the text is in shape for publication it still needs to be formatted for the eBook of choice. In all eBook preparation tools that I have used, you have to identify the meta data, chapter titles, italics, and any other special formatting. Depending upon the tool, what will be the base font and size, will the book title be on every page, how do you handle the chapter title, is “AE” one or two characters in the base font encoding, it there a unique title page, and where do you force a page break? In addition, many books have graphics that must be added back at the right place, and-- in many that I have prepared—the MobileRead logo added for identification. Linking footnotes to the text can sometimes take many days.
A while ago as an experiment, a few of us took the same base text from Project Gutenberg and produced books in our own way. The results varied widely since each of us have our own style. I felt that all were superior to the automated, mechanical translations performed by manybooks.net. If absolute large numbers of eBooks available at MobileRead were our goal, this could be achieved in a matter of days. Fortunately, this is not our goal. The books offered here are “value added” through more proofing and better formatting to name two.