Quote:
Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald
I fully agree. E-Books should start out with fully editable files such as Word files. What I was trying to point out was formatting in Word is unstable (especially if illustrated). The formatting in PDFs is stable and that is probably why publishers like to use them for print ready copy instead of Word docs. That is probably the reason why many publishers are having to convert PDFs to e-books is all they retained of the original editted manuscripts were the print ready files, thinking they were all they would ever need (short-sighted thinking considering how cheap storage is now; it's not like they need to store hard copies).
|
But when are the publishers going to realize that this for NEW books? When are they going to take the author's original digital file (with all the edits and updates) and use that to generate the eBook editions? Sure there can be issues with graphics coming from Word. But if you have someone who knows how to deal with ePub, then these issues can be hand tweaked as needed. I've found that once you have a good ePub, Calibre does a good job converting to MS Reader and Mobipocket from there. So all we need is that good ePub edition starting from a good digital file that's not PDF or some other awful format.
The publishers could store the original document, the PDF, the print ready copy, and all the eBook copies for very little storage.