Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Proofreading is an extremely costly process. It's probably not economically viable for publishers who are doing "cheap and cheerful" conversions of back-catalog stuff.
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Having done a couple of homebrew dead-tree-to-ebook conversions, I can completely agree with this. It is a huge time sink, even taking out the dead tree part and doing just format conversions -- you still have to go through the whole darn thing.
If you are a publishing company and have two staffers assigned to working on eBook technical matters, it'd be a pretty daunting task to do all your expected job responsibilities AND proofread a dozen conversions a week.
However, I agree. I can take the occasional "carriage return didn't get converted to a space" or "hyphenation in the middle of a line" issues. I've seen some truly unreadable content too. The unreadable stuff should never had made it to Amazon -- not when you can spot-check a book and find this kind of problem in under thirty seconds!
So the publishers need to step up to the plate, Amazon needs to reject titles, and consumers need to beat on both for really badly done conversions.