Wanted: Company who makes Epub

[seglare80]

Hi!

I´m a writer in Sweden who needs a company / or a person to help me with my Epub conversion.

I have heard that companys in India are cheep and good to work with?

Please send me a mail to bhagwanltd@live.com

Best Regards // Mattias

[AnemicOak]

MR member Hitch has a company offering eBook production services...
http://www.booknook.biz

[seglare80]

Hi!

Thank you for your kind answer but l need a company in India so it´s cheap. No EU or US prices please.

Best Regards Mattias

[eschwartz]

And I have heard that companies who are cheap and good to work with are a contradiction in terms; as they say, there's no such thing as a free lunch.

Indian companies can afford to be cheap because the service they give is garbage.

Hitch will provide good service, and Indian companies will provide cheapness, but no one will offer both.

I'm sure your book deserves quality attention.

[seglare80]

I have a quality company in New York who makes fantastic Epub. But they cost 1-1,5 dollar per page.

l need a quality company who make conversion for 0,3-0,5 dollar per page at the most.

//M

[mrmikel]

Why not just buy Atlantis Word Processor if you don't want to spend much money. $10 USD with a coupon found on the internet. It takes Word, RTF and text files. Or run it through Calibre, which is free.

You might find the Indian cheap companies will run the file through Calibre and charge you the low price you like, even though you could do that yourself for free.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by seglare80

I have a quality company in New York who makes fantastic Epub. But they cost 1-1,5 dollar per page.

l need a quality company who make conversion for 0,3-0,5 dollar per page at the most.

//M

If they were a quality company, they wouldn't charge 30-50¢ per page...

That is only enough money to buy you the convenience of not having to install calibre and watch the progress wheel spin yourself. Like mrmikel said.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

If they were a quality company, they wouldn't charge 30-50¢ per page...

That is only enough money to buy you the convenience of not having to install calibre and watch the progress wheel spin yourself. Like mrmikel said.

First, my sincere thanks to both @AnemicOak and @eschwartz for remembering me.

Now, seglare80: I don't know what type of source materials you have, so I can't speak to whether or not $1-$1.50/page is a good or crap price. Without knowing more, it's impossible to say. If you're providing them with Word (or word-processing of any kind) files, and they're not very complicated, that seems QUITE high. OTOH, if those are exceedingly complex books--tons of bulleted, numbered lists, images, tables, lots of clean-up, maybe it's a decent price.

However, I must tell you, $0.30/page is scraping the bottom of even the Indian barrel; most companies there start around that price for converting even Word files (per page) to ePUB, never mind something more complex. The average price for a moderate ePUB page is $0.65-$0.80, and more for complex pages. IN India.

I recall that I had a company in Russia that send me some PDF pages to quote; when I returned the pricing, they were incensed, and informed me that they demanded pricing of $0.10/page. When I got done laughing, I told them to download Calibre, so-long and so-luck.

I've seen companies--a LOT of them--that charge prices at/near ours, and invariably, I get their ePUB product from (unhappy) customers who ask us to "fix" the book, and, sure enough, when I open the ePUB, I'm faced with a boatload of Calibre-named Styles. I have told the story here often of the guy who ripped the elderly man off for $6K for a print "and ebook" project, who used Calibre to make two ebooks, who knew so little that he didn't even know that having each sentence as a paragraph was "bad." This isn't Calibre's fault; it's the fault of people who think that ebook-formatting is clicking a button. It's not, as the regulars here know.

There are a lot of uber-bad converters out there. I agree with the others; for that type of money, use Calibre and edit it yourself, or buy AWP and make it that way. I haven't seen $0.10/$0.30/page from PDF (or even from Word) even from the new Chinese or Indonesian companies. And certainly not from any Indian companies. You can try Fiverr, I suppose. There are certainly a lot of faux-Mobi converters there working for $5, and if it doesn't work out, it's not a lot of money.

Best of luck to you,
Hitch

[faltradl]

@seglare80
Counterquestion: Do you want be payed for your work, as you want to pay? Please give yourself an honest answer.

[Jellby]

I can do that for that price, if I get to choose the page size

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by Jellby

I can do that for that price, if I get to choose the page size

[mrmikel]

Or by the word, if the words are like an or to! No antidisestablishmentarianism allowed!

[mrmikel]

Doing the PDF I am working on now, at 14 hours a week, it will probably take a couple of months, minimum. The footnotes fill half of each page, making it unreadable as it stands. I had to copy the underlying text of the epub, put it into AWP, publish it, then bring it into Calibre editor to work on because of all the odd colors and text sizes. I also had to fetch maps that were not brought over either, although the pictures were.
Oh, that doesn't include the RaNSoM note text that has be corrected by hand, either. And expect the Chinese earning nothing to correct idiomatic English?

Hitch and her crew earn every penny they get and they probably don't get enough half the time.

[theducks]

Another case of a company wanting to sell their product at top dollar but not wanting to pay their supply chain a living wage.

To all prospective customers:
Offer this company 30% of what they are asking for this book and see what they think of that

[AlPe]

Originally Posted by seglare80

I´m a writer in Sweden who needs a company / or a person to help me with my Epub conversion.

I have heard that companys in India are cheep and good to work with?

Please send me a mail to bhagwanltd@live.com

Quite peculiar choice of email address, for a guy in Sweden, asking about Indian publishing services, given the fact that BHAGWAN LTD looks very much like an Indian company name.

Anyhow, I just second the previous observations about cost vs. quality (or the lack thereof).