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Originally Posted by Ankh
I am almost certain that the rest of the publishing industry doesn't do so. The complaints about additional costs, stories that the price to produce ebook is the same if not higher than that for pbook... It is clear that ebook preparation is a separate process, sometimes done by other publishing house, that reuse is minimal at best, nonexistent in big number of cases. I am not surprised by ebook prices, really.
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Nor am I, but it has less to do with costs higher than need be than with publisher stupidity that results in the higher costs. (Like the comment elsewhere about the publisher stating their ebook price was pegged to the cost of the
cloth bound edition. <blink> Excuse me? Do you folks actually want to
sell ebooks?)
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But for ebook publishing and digital distribution, Baen is anything but your typical publishing house. The list of differences is too long, and not needed, I hope. It is reasonable to expect that Baen is not bound by the "best practices" of the industry. When it comes to digital era, "the industry" and its practices sucks. Big time.
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You can argue that Baen is actually
creating the "best practices" in the industry.
From where I sit, we're waiting on Adobe. Publishers all use InDesign to do typeset and markup. The output from InDesign is a PDF that goes to the printer and is used to make plates. InDesign
can output ePub as well as PDF, but the ePub output is terrible.
What we want is ePub output from InDesign that can be used as-is as an ebook. That can in turn be converted by scripted operation to other ebook formats. Production of ebooks can happen automatically as part of the production process and become a true part of the workflow.
An Adobe rep at the Barnes and Noble nook press conference told me a "point release" of InDesign with better ePub support was available from Adobe, so I assume they are aware of the need for better ePub support. I'm just bemused that is isn't there already, since Adobe was the biggest push behind ePub in the first place.
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Dennis