Quote:
Originally Posted by Ankh
Oh for crying out loud!
What, even Baen, the poster company for e-book publishing still needs additional "steps of ebook production and formatting"? It is not integral part of their regular workflow, they don't have a standard electronic version as a byproduct of pbook run, where different formats are generated by a click of a button or execution of a script?  |
I think it depends on what you consider the standard workflow.
The last I knew. markup and typesetting for Baen's pbooks were done by Nancy Hanger, their Managing Editor. Nancy would generate a PDF that would go the the printer, and the printer's image setter would generate printing plates from the PDF.
Publishers all use Adobe InDesign these days for typesetting and markup. The problem from our viewpoint is that while InDesign can output ePub output as well as PDF files, but the ePub it generates is poor. (Adobe is working on this.)
Doing what I think you want would require PDF and ePub generated as output from InDesign for a book. Since ePub contains all of the required metadata, you
could have a post processing script that did conversion to other ebook formats, if you had decent ePub to start with.
I think Arnold Bailey starts with the same copy edited and proofread manuscript in Word format that Nancy will use to create the source files for the printer, and I suspect most of his process is scripted. A lot of the work done by the MR posters creating ebooks for MobileRead is requied because the source material
isn't in good condition, and requires massaging to get it into a format a decent ebook can be generated from.
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Dennis