Quote:
Originally Posted by Alfy
That is one bit I do not understand: I assume that, when you receive the original from the author, it is formatted in Word format or equivalent. I further assume any edits made by the publishing house are made on this original file. Only as a final step is the PDF for publishing produced. Could you not simply produce mobi or epub files from this Word document? That would be easy enough.
It is my understanding that the biggest problem facing publishers to produce ebooks for old editions is that they do not have the original Word document, and have to extract the text from the PDF. But that does not hold true for newer books.
And by the way, yes, it is great to have a publisher posting on this forum. Still waiting for Hachette to turn up, though...  |
Lets suppose you get a word file. It does not translate easily to ePUB. Word likes to fix the font size, fix the margins, etc. etc. Some writers may use word but others may use Indesign or Framemaker or any number of other authoring tools. They are typically converted to PDF early in the game and the publisher sends out proofs to the author. Markups happen but seldom to the original document since they are just page changes. Often they make the changes directly to the PDF and then it is the PDF that gets sent to the printer.
Many publishers do not understand source code control or any of the software tools or methodologies. At some point eBooks may be easy to produce but not today for most publishers I am afraid. Authors are doing their own thing so it is not as easy as you seem to think.
Dale