Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
The original problem was only generating eBooks. But the point was that by restricting your choices you can get something that works. You have to think about the whole chain. The reason that it is so much work now is that people write the text in word and does not use consistent markup.
|
Another reason is that there are a half dozen formats, all of which behave differently, even when fed pretty standardized text.
But my main point was that, for most writers, ebooks are still only a small part of the big picture, and they're not going to select their writing software based on what's going to make it easy to translate into ebooks. Nor should they have to.
By the time a manuscript gets into typeset format--and there's no guarantee, by the way, that it's going to be imported electronically at all--it may very well be keyboarded in from the paper ms.--I don't think there's very much left of the original Word formatting. The trick will be to get ebook formatting done at that stage as a normal part of the work flow. I'm hoping that by my next book, that will be a done deal.