Quote:
Originally Posted by TallMomof2
I am working on converting an image pdf that was created from screen captures to rtf for my husband. The original pdf is close to 200 pages. It took me 6 hours to prep the pdf for my OCR software because there were a lot of graphics that needed to be excluded. It took the OCR software about 45 minutes to process with me sitting there and making corrections when the software wasn't sure. So far I've spent 12 hours editing in Word and I still have several dozen errors to fix. The rtf file is 80+ pages. It also includes about a dozen graphic files that had to edited to view properly in the rtf.
That is an extreme example but I've spent 20 hours proofing google scans after they were OCRed so preparing a good digital file is not a trivial exercise. But I still don't see how anyone can say the costs of paperbook and digital book are the same. Once you get a good rtf it can be easily converted to any number of formats.
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This is not exactly a good example of how to make an e-book. At some point, pretty much all books printed in the last 20 or more years were a digital document, MS Word being a popular example (PDFs are too cumbersome to edit but do make a stable print ready document). It is much more efficient to format the digital file than to scan, run OCR, then edit scanning/OCR errors. Granted, the latter is often necessary for older, out of print books but the main focus here has been on newer books and they all will have a digital file to work with.