Why is backlists taken so long to be turned into e-books?

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

But you can't expect a subcontracting system of scan-and-OCR to be able to go through more than a half-dozen to a dozen books in a month, with any quality.

Any way you do it, you're going to see a huge bottleneck in getting backlist books published as ebooks. Maybe, someday, a radical method of allowing readers/peers to join the process, and speed up certain aspects of it, will happen. But the present publishing process simply won't allow for it.

Publishers should subcontract to Project Gutenberg! PG already has a system in place and they turn out good work.

[44Dave]

I don't understand why scanning and proofing for major mistakes isn't the job of some poor intern in the basement. At least for big name publishers. That could at least take the grunt work out of the hands of an editor.

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by 44Dave

I don't understand why scanning and proofing for major mistakes isn't the job of some poor intern in the basement. At least for big name publishers. That could at least take the grunt work out of the hands of an editor.

Off-site freelancers are used for a lot of this sort of work anyway, not just backlist.

[thinkpad]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

Any way you do it, you're going to see a huge bottleneck in getting backlist books published as ebooks. Maybe, someday, a radical method of allowing readers/peers to join the process, and speed up certain aspects of it, will happen. But the present publishing process simply won't allow for it.

Imagine the speed with which backlists could be out. Everyone enough interested in a book and a little tech savy could offer their help to see the book out in a digital form.

[phenomshel]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

Harper Collins recently revealed to me (through one of its authors) that they farm out the process of scanning and OCR'ing backlist titles at a minimum cost per book. Apparently the cost of prepping the copy doesn't include proofing the resultant copy, which HC releases onto the market with not even a cursory check. Comments I've seen elsewhere lead me to believe that this is the norm with publishers.

The impression I get from this is that publishers like HC don't care about the content at all, just the impression that they are putting it out there for whatever rubes want to pay for it. (They are also clearly applying the bulk of their efforts to new books, which would be expected to earn them more profit per book in the shorter term.) Think of it like a used book market that publishers really aren't interested in entering.

I tend to believe you. I bought a copy of "Done Gone Wrong" by Cathy Pickens, first published in 2005 by Minotaur (subsidiary of MacMillan). It's about drug trials... but almost every instance of the word "drug" was spelled "drag". There were a few cases of "rales" for "rules", too. Considering the book's subject, there were a LOT of errors. I'll eventually probably use calibre's Tweak ePub feature to fix it, but... it seems like an awful lot of work to do on something I purchased legitimately, you know?