Quote:
Originally Posted by ahi
I think ePub may become a secondary standard--but I think it will lose prestige, becoming relegated to use for user-generated and (possibly) self-ePublished stuff. Professional quality publications from publishers/companies will necessarily be PDFs.
Granted. But I don't think the average publisher's fear of losing their production files is sufficient for them to want to back them up on their customers' devices.
I myself don't even feel compelled to release the LaTeX file (a 75 KB text file basically) for "The Art of War" for such reasons... not even while I make the eBooks available for free. And if you take a large publisher, frankly if they ever have problems doing conversion into a new format, they'll probably offshore retyping to two different Indian or Chinese companies and (beyond in-house proofreading) compare the two copies to ensure they catch all mistakes made only by one or the other... and they'll have the book re-/newly typeset for whatever format with hardly noticeable new expense (given the moneys they burn through).
What you describe might be a compelling reason for a self-publishing author to use a readily convertible format--but I don't think it would be for a publisher.
- Ahi
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Ahh, well now you bring up an interesting point in what you said about publishers and the lengths they would go to for producing a book - outsourcing, re-typing etc. This is probably the domain of the publisher 'as is', but with a rapidly evolving e-book market, the proliferation of devices and the newly profitable re-issue of back-catalogues, the modern or evolving
publishing house will see a lot of merit in the production of ePub over PDF. If they can cut corners at any stage and maximise profits, I think they would. Imagine this 'new' publishing house (or at least evolving) and they can now re-issue thousands of books at a fraction of the cost of the pbook production (granted the books would have to go through a preliminary preperation stage). And then imagine that they can re-issue these books on a whiim (change of market, upsurge in demand etc) and the ePub becomes a goldengoose for them. No need to outsource for a new edition, no need to employ the typesetters and proofreaders and such. They can keep these ePub files (or the base XHTML) and shoot out new versions whenever they feel like it.
What I think I'm driving at is that these publishing companies, as they evolve, might lean toward the cheap data reproduction of ePub over costly re-setting of an already published PDF.