Give Me Your Opinion

[taxlady]

Having worked for magazines, the conversion from a publishing file to an eBook is a lot more complicated than one would think. I have done it for magazine files, and it was a royal PITA. The files I sent to be printed were huge, so the conversion to eBook has to shrink those files, without sacrificing visual quality. That is something I don't ever want to do again.

CD

But the written part is already copy edited and edited and doesn't need to be done again. It may need the layout changed or fixed, but the text won't suddenly have typos and spelling or grammatical mistakes that weren't in the original.

 

[dragnlaw]

Depends on when that book was printed. Before or after computers.
I once did some proofreading for (forgotten name) that were computerizing books. Was fun.

 

[rodentraiser]

Your post makes it sound like Kindle is responsible for the conversion from paper to electronic. Not the case. ALL books start out electronic and some are printed from that electronic file. Any text errors are the fault of the publisher. Books come to my kindle app from the library which gets them from the publisher.

I don't care what's responsible for anything paper or electronic. I still hate reading on a Kindle. End of story.

 

[caseydog]

But the written part is already copy edited and edited and doesn't need to be done again. It may need the layout changed or fixed, but the text won't suddenly have typos and spelling or grammatical mistakes that weren't in the original.

Well... if the eBook is being made at the same time as the printed book, the text can be a little different, and one can have typos when the other one doesn't. If you do one before the other, the text should be the same.

Some of the eBook sellers wanted to release the eBook versions on the same day the printed version shipped. That made it possible for typos to get fixed in one version, and missed in the other.

I did the printed version of the magazines first, and then worked with the eBook company to convert it. It was usually formatting glitches that had me pulling my hair out, not typos.

CD

 

[caseydog]

I don't care what's responsible for anything paper or electronic. I still hate reading on a Kindle. End of story.

My mom was an avid reader, and as her eyesight degraded, she loved that she could adjust the type size on her iPad books.

I personally like that I can have a bunch of books (and movies) on one small device, which was great when I was traveling a lot.

CD

 

[rodentraiser]

I have reading glasses. Plus I miss the illustrations.

 

[dcSaute]

some books (pages) are scanned, and OCR (Optical character recognition) used in the "transmorphification" to electronic . . .

it does not always go well....

in researching genealogy" kinds of documents, I've seen 4-5-8 "different" text 'letters' of the (usually handwritten - ala census data) 'human recognized' name.

and... printed matter - newspapers / et. al. frequently 'miss' proper text-from-ocr-scans.

 

[dragnlaw]

I admit I didn't do the proof reading of the OCR (thanks dcS for reminding me) for very long but there really weren't an awful lot of horrendous amount of errors. For all I know they could have been typo errors in the original books!