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Old 10-01-2009, 02:39 PM   #36
DMcCunney
New York Editor
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DawnFalcon View Post
DMcCunney - Yea, the "ARC" versions of Baen books are like that, but well... they're ARC's. The final ebooks are, ime, better than trade paperbacks from other publishers.
Agreed. Which is why the errors in the Baen ebook were so striking. They normally produce very clean copy. Once it was confirmed it was an ARC, All Became Clear.

Quote:
I don't get why you wouldn't use the same source text for the ebook...sure, the structure will need fixing, but spelling?

(And one reason I buy more Baen eBooks is that they're typically $6!)
But you generally do use the same source text for the ebook.

The main variation I can think of is some of the Amazon Kindle editions. When enough people click "I want to read this book in a Kindle edition" that Amazon decides it's worth doing, there may not be an extant electronic file to start from. In that case, a printed version is scanned and OCRed, thd the result becomes the Kindle version. (Note that copy editing and proof reading don't happen...)

In current releases, the publisher gets a manuscript in MS Word format. That gets copy edited and proofread, then imported into Adobe InDesign for markup and typesetting. The output from InDesign is a PDF that goes to the printer, and is the input to the imagesetter than actually makes the plates the printer will print from.

One issue for ebooks is that InDesign produces crappy ePub output. Decent ePub requires well formed XML as input, and while the tools are starting to appear to markup to XML, they aren't widely adopted in publishing yet. We'll see. From the viewpoint of the person doing the markup, whether the output is a PDF or XML should be irrelevant. They just need a tool with the features they need to do the job, in an interface that makes using the tool reasonable.
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Dennis
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