Quote:
Originally Posted by Sweetpea
I can understand that, at least for books that are out of print.
But, I keep wondering how new books are being printed. Aren't they delivered to the printer in an electronic format? If so, how much more time would it take to also transform that electronic format into an established ebook format?
The way I see it (which might be a tad bit simplified), once you print a pbook, the cost to make an ebook too, would be small. The cost to create ebooks from out-of-print pbooks, on the other hand, would be high...
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I think the cost to make an eBook is too small. Yes, the print book is essentially always delivered to the printer as a PDF, made from a page layout program like Quark or InDesign. And the publisher will typically send us this same PDF (if we're lucky we get the InDesign file). But it's a long way from PDF to XHTML and ePub. Lots can go wrong:
[1] The letters themselves. I've seen some books where the ligatures (two or three letters grouped as one, like fl or fi) were done in a different font. But you'd type a capital "W" in that font to get the character that looks like "fi". So if you pull the text from the PDF, the word "file" would look like "Wle".
Or the typesetter may not have used the correct accented character, instead typing the accent and the letter separately, and then squeezing them together in the layout program. When we export the text, it's wrong.
And then there are characters that don't exist in most fonts. I've seen several books lately about the Warsaw ghetto in World War Two. There are lots of Polish proper names, with slashes on the letter "L", and dots above the letters "S" and "Z". And it's really hard to find people who can proofread that kind of stuff in India! Spellchecking is worthless in that situation.
[2] More importantly, a PDF is a purely visual rendering of a book. It's like saying, "put the letter 'a' (using the font 'Bembo Italic') 2.3156 inches below the top of the page, and 4.1722 inches from the left edge, and make it .1344 inches wide." It doesn't know if that letter is part of the book title, or part of a footnote, or part of a web address.
To make a coherent eBook, we need to identify the function of all those parts of the book--this is a regular text paragraph, that's a reference to a footnote, this is the caption to the photograph on the next page). Most of the time that process is rather easy, but not always. Computer programs help, but they are not nearly as good at recognizing patterns as humans are. For example, figuring out when a new paragraph starts is surprisingly difficult (hence the occasional "split" paragraph in The Hobbit).
[3] The design needs to be adapted. Print designs start with the size of the book itself, and how many pages it's supposed to contain. The designer has total control over the fonts, spacing, everything. With eBooks we don't know any of this. The page could be 3 inches wide, or 30 inches. We don't know if it will be color or black & white. There will probably only be one font available, but we don't know which one. Dealing with these restrictions can seem impossible at times. How do you make a sidebar or a marginal note for a Palm reader?
[4] There are editorial choices that need to be made. What if the print book says, "turn the page for the answer to the quiz?"? What if you're supposed to fill in the blanks on the page? What if a book had two half-title pages, just to avoid a few blank pages at the end? What function does a title page have in an eBook? What about the blurbs designed to convince you to buy the book? By the time you see them, the purchase has already been made!
Some publishers assume that nothing should go wrong in all this processing. The evidence suggests that they are wrong, and that much more proofreading and general attention is required.
Dave