Quote:
Originally Posted by Tuna
JAgainst that, what realistically is the set up cost of providing ebooks to a commercial standard? How much does it cost a publisher to convert a single book?
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That question deserves its own thread.
Off the top of my head:
Good OCR software--ABBYY Finereader Pro is currently $400; while that'll work for any number of books, it (or something like it) will be necessary for even one. (Don't assume that any publisher has digital copies of their books, especially those not currently in print.)
eBook software: mostly free; we can assume maybe $50 in ancillary software that might work with their particular system. (Tif split/combine software, or indexing software, or whatever.)
1 physical copy of book to be destroyed.
Scanner: high-speed double-sided scanners of decent quality & speed start at costs of about $500 new. (Theoretically, anyone could use an all-in-one copy/scan/print device. It might be worth doing for one book, but if you were doing five, what you saved in startup costs, you'd've lost in hourly wages.)
Time: 1 hr scanning (on high-speed scanner; includes time for QC'ing page count to make sure there's no skips). Scan at 400dpi for paperbacks & most hardcovers. Double this time if there are color images involved; switching the settings back & forth takes a while.
OCR: 1 hour. Being generous, there; it's probably less for most books.
OCR correction: 1/2 minute/page, if you've got a quick & skilled corrector and relatively clean originals (no script fonts, no 5-pt type footnotes, etc.); up to 5 min/page otherwise.
Output to Word or HTML: instant (more-or-less)
Edit Word/HTML to fix formatting:
Normal paperback: 1-2 hours
Slightly more complex book: 2-5 hrs
Textbook with images, charts, index, etc.: 10-20 hrs
Final QC, checking for typos, formatting errors, and so on:
Normal paperbacks: 1 min/2 pages (average, not exact)
More complex: 1 min/page
Textbook: 1 1/2 min/page (up to 3 min/page for books that are just packed with charts & tables). Index QC takes longer.
Assume that the labor for everything costs at least double minimum wage, except for the raw scanning, which can probably be found at half-again minimum wage. In large cities in the US, assume you can find scanning for $10-$12/hour, and the rest at $15-$20/hour.
Then you have the "make an ebook" part. If the ebook is a PDF, this takes at fastest, no time; for a "good" PDF, 10 minutes (add title/author metadata and bookmarks). For most other ebook formats, call it 30 minutes each if it's a simple conversion; adapting complex tables to .mobi or .epub may not be so quick.
TOTAL ESTIMATE for a standard paperback:
$1000 equipment (hardware/software)
~10 hrs labor @ $15/hour = $150
I can convert a paperback to PDF in an afternoon. But I've been doing this a long time, and know shortcuts that are rare even in digital imaging industries.
That's not counting the time it takes to learn the software, the ebook formats, research what scanners work best, and so on. And it entirely ignores the marketing side of it: now that you have an ebook, what do you do with it?