Quote:
Originally Posted by starrigger
Jon, you're assuming the author has some choice in the matter, and that there's some kind of personal attention given to the books when they go through the conversion process. RTF is what they take, and it has to be formatted to fairly restrictive guidelines. There's a work flow at ereads, and after that there's a work flow at fictionwise and all the other shops. The problem is a combination of outdated mass-production conversion software, and too little attention to quality control at the retailers.
Also, what writer can afford to spend the time fine-tuning an html file for an ebook retailer? (And in truth, you can get perfectly good conversions from the RTF saved to compact html in Word. I tested my own files before they went in, and I got good ebooks. The problem was not in the files, it was in the conversion.)
And to put it in perspective, let's remember that it's a rare paper edition that doesn't come through with some typos, these days. Sometimes the typos are introduced during the final error-correction pass, as has happened to me.
|
Since your books are being sold without DRM, would it then not make sense for you to send in your conversions to the various different formats since you made good editions?
The other thing to do (If it was me) would be to try to find out just how this conversion process works to try to find where the weak link is since we know there is one.