Tor.com: Watch the Skies
Go on over to Tor.com and sign up for their newsletter–as a reward for doing so, you’ll get some free ebooks. The first is Brandon "Finishing the Wheel of Time" Sanderson’s The Mistborn. And next up is supposed to be John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War.
I got the first book via email the other day. It looks like it’s just the typesetting file converted to a PDF, so it’s not an ideal ebook–I wouldn’t want to try to read this on a hand-held device, but I guess I can’t really complain since it’s free. I do wonder, though, how much effort it would have taken to convert the text to a hand-held-friendly format.
--E
11:51 pm Feb-16-2008Converting to ebooks is kind of a pain in the ass. First, if the typesetting file has been constructed with any irregularities (as it is at least 50% of the time–you should see some of the shit I get) or has funny design elements, then it’s going to require a lot of hand-checking to clean up the text.
Then, every ebook reader has its own proprietary format. Someone has to run every book through the system to make eight different files, then check that they all went through cleanly. This then all needs to be archived and so on.
Yes, ebooks shouldn’t cost as much as paper books, but given all the work that’s done to make them, they aren’t cheap to produce, either. Whereas the PDF–that’s what goes to the printer anyway. It’s part of the cost of making the paper edition.
John Joseph Adams
3:34 pm Feb-17-2008Is there not a master Word doc that has the most up to date ms. text in it? I can convert a Word doc to a Mobipocket ebook in 10 seconds. Hell, I can even make an anthology with a TOC that has hyperlinks to each of the stories and a link at the end of each that takes you back to the TOC page…in like five minutes.
If the only final version comes out of some typesetting program–well, I have no idea about those, so perhaps that’s where the complications come in.
If there *is* no master Word doc, perhaps what publishers need to do is rethink some of the ways they enter edits and come up with a final ms., so as to better facilitate the manufacture of ebooks. It shouldn’t be so difficult.