Quote:
Originally Posted by Direct Ebooks
We usually get the file in pdf and have to go back to xml. its also true to say that it could be done in house but results are generally much better when outsourced to quality partners or indivduals.
There certainly is cost associated, boith in time, effort and money.
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Then the publishing world is way behind the times. In academic journal publishing, they have been asking for electronic copies (not pdfs) for journal articles and figures, tables, etc, for more than than the last 15 years.
So I do not believe that there are no existing electronic formats for most books published over that time period. I also do not believe that that much work is required to reformat them (yes! you can actually do a save to html from Word and then run Tidy in clean mode to fix the majority of the html issues created by Word). Yes there are other programs that will read in Word files and output html.
Even if that cost is $800 per book (one full person day fully costed at $100/hr) it is insignificant when split over the number of units sold.
I would guess that many authors, would also be very very happy to convert their out of print work to ebook formats themselves if they could be promised space on the server and a reasonable split of the take.
It is funny how all publishers want to talk price and not cost, isn't it.