Ereading all over today's Wall Street Journal

[charleski]

Originally Posted by gastan

Typesetting is done by compter so there is no added cost for producing an electronic file. Scanning an existing book and OCR'ing it and editing it can be done cheaply. There are member here that say they can do it in 3-4 hours with less than $1k worth of equipment. Once the file exists, it is ridiculously easy to produce an ebook in any format you desire. Ask any of many people here at MR that produce the e-books in the download forum.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Converting a layout into code depends on the layout being coherent and harmonious. Most of the time it looks good, but underneath the hood it's a mess. No way does it only take 3-4 hours to OCR a book - that's pure fantasy. Even when a previous ebook version exists, converting it to a different format depends on the original being coded correctly - far too often they're a mess of adhoc styles and embedded linebreaks that ignore basic principles of typesetting and need to be refactored.

The simple fact is that a lot of commercial ebooks look like shit purely because publishers want to do it on the cheap.

Lulu's ebook conversion service starts at $99 and goes up to $299 per book for a basic conversion - that's roughly realistic.

[DJHARKAVY]

Originally Posted by charleski

Nothing could be further from the truth. Converting a layout into code depends on the layout being coherent and harmonious. Most of the time it looks good, but underneath the hood it's a mess. No way does it only take 3-4 hours to OCR a book - that's pure fantasy. Even when a previous ebook version exists, converting it to a different format depends on the original being coded correctly - far too often they're a mess of adhoc styles and embedded linebreaks that ignore basic principles of typesetting and need to be refactored.

I don't know.

When my wife used to proofread fiction, she got them as reflowable pdf files. Seems to me that these are generally pretty simple to convert to other formats.

And, you need only pay the price for cleaning up the file once per opus. As opposed to warehousing, shipping and markup for the assumed return rate on paper books which occurs for each individual book.

[L.J. Sellers]

More e-reading news from WSJ. Laura Lippman, bestselling crime fiction writer, sold more e-books than hard covers during the first week of her new book launch, I'd Know You Anywhere.
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/08/...an-hardcovers/

[oggelbe2007]

Originally Posted by FizzyWater

No kidding! Who here ONLY reads 2-3 books per month?!

Who here would rather sleep than finish that LAST chapter?!

[wachuko]

Originally Posted by FizzyWater

No kidding! Who here ONLY reads 2-3 books per month?!

+1... since getting my eReader I am reading several books per week... in the last trip I made to Chile I read one on the way there... one while I was in the meetings (well... not while the meetings were taking place ), and another one on the way back...

Add to that all the books I have purchased simply because it is so easy to click away....

During my kids vacation they downloaded books from the local library and we loaded them into our readers... we did not even use to go to the library at all... most of the books my children read we got at B&N while drinking coffee... They would pick one or two books to buy, read one or two books while in the store... we sat down to drink coffee while reading, this is now a tradition, my 7 year old son calls it Thursday Reading Nights...

But with the eReaders my children are now reading even more. to the eReaders!

[DrunkenDonkey]

I saw the topic of OCRing the books... that's not 4 hours indeed, more like 4 days, I have been doing it for some time with my printed books that can't be found in ebook.
1. Scan (+ destroy the book, as it has to be opened flat)
2. First complete read inside the OCR program, paying special attention to every spot it is unsure
3. Convert to openoffice
4. Spellchecking pass + macro pass (there are macros done to find errors during the OCR, there are hundreds of them)
5. Formatting (I use sfb->fb2), putting all tags everywhere
6. Reading again the result copy, clearing leftover errors
(7). If you can survive it - another reading pass, there are always 15-30 leftover errors after first 6
That it takes to produce good electronic copy, the rest is a joke

[AGB]

Originally Posted by DrunkenDonkey

I saw the topic of OCRing the books... that's not 4 hours indeed, more like 4 days, I have been doing it for some time with my printed books that can't be found in ebook.
1. Scan (+ destroy the book, as it has to be opened flat)
2. First complete read inside the OCR program, paying special attention to every spot it is unsure
3. Convert to openoffice
4. Spellchecking pass + macro pass (there are macros done to find errors during the OCR, there are hundreds of them)
5. Formatting (I use sfb->fb2), putting all tags everywhere
6. Reading again the result copy, clearing leftover errors
(7). If you can survive it - another reading pass, there are always 15-30 leftover errors after first 6
That it takes to produce good electronic copy, the rest is a joke

Still, that is not much time and money compared to printing pbooks, shipping them, storing them, and so on.

Besides, most books they sell came from a digital file to begin with. It isn't much trouble making an ebook in the big picture. Even if they had to do it like you do it.

[sassanik]

Originally Posted by AGB

Still, that is not much time and money compared to printing pbooks, shipping them, storing them, and so on.

Besides, most books they sell came from a digital file to begin with. It isn't much trouble making an ebook in the big picture. Even if they had to do it like you do it.

Actually I would say a number of books do not have original digital copies. Pre-1990's stuff, unless they have reprinted it, most likely to do not have "good" easy to convert digital files.

The one thing they don't seem to be thinking about is that once they have a decent digital copy it is not difficult to convert it and keep it up. Frankly the cost of not creating the digital copy is probably higher than not in the long run.

Amy