> Some works are very clearly just OCR'd from the print version
Why are books even OCRed to create ebooks? Do they not have the original digital copy of them to work from?
Why are books even OCRed to create ebooks? Do they not have the original digital copy of them to work from?
You would think the same people who design, manufacture, and market a product can have their shit together long enough to take some great beauty shots for e-tailers. But nope. The vast majority of vendors are so poorly organized, so bureaucratically frozen, that getting them to do anything that isn't already part of the process is like pulling teeth.
So, "please send us digital copies of this manuscript" is pretty much out of the question. The easiest way is to take a copy of the book, OCR it yourself, and then get the license to distribute it.
The customers would then be able to customize the font sizes/stylings, etc., and use those settings for all the ebooks they read.
So they're not willing to provide the original source files, or what?
> edits late in the process are made to the typeset InDesign files, after the structure has been lost.
Wow, they do this so haphazardly that they don't even bother to go back to the original Word file and add the same edits?
Is InDesign used for all books? I don't see why you would need it for something without any figures/graphs/tables. You could just use Word, and things would work out fine.
As for why OCR is used, just look at the range of books that are now available electronically. There are a lot of books from the 1980s and earlier that are now available as EPUBs. Do you really think that it would have been easier to use the source files off floppies? (Keep in mind that the floppies are, for the most part, long gone.)
How are reprints of such books achieved?
How about effectively dealing with ligatures?
I know that people like to harp on and on about how great LaTeX or InDesign are, and when it comes to complex layouts (particularly LaTeX if there are lots of referenced figures and InDesign for text wrapping, etc.), I agree. If you were writing a scientific article, I'd tell you to use LaTeX. If you were creating a magazine, I'd tell you to use InDesign.
But for your typical, text-only, fiction novel, the kind you're most likely to read on a Kindle? I don't think it really makes a difference.
I guess they could generate PDFs from Word files with Acrobat and shoehorn them into the process, but any publisher that is actually satisfied with doing that is bonkers.
(And even if they weren't, I would appreciate such examples.)
People make a big deal about how using Word will lock you into a certain format when they're storing their data on floppies or, even worse, rasterizing it and keeping just the PS. Seems like the latter is a lot worse than the former.
Typography is more art than science.
What is the incentive for better typography? Most books are like mini-monopolies (over the short term). If the typography of a book sucks and it sucks on all platforms, what is a consumer to do if they want to read the book? Fallback to print? Publishers probably don't mind that. It's true that all things being equal, typography could be a deciding factor for the consumer, but my gut says that in most cases the content is weighted much higher.
I think the platform could benefit from typography. A consumer may choose an iPad over a Kindle if the iPad had a better reputation for typography. But since there is _art_ involved it might not be economical for the platform to pursue it. Which is a better selling point: Our platform has 100 really nice books or our platform has 100,000 books?
As far as your final hypothetical goes I honestly do not know what answer you were expecting, but maybe that's the point?
I believe this is true in general. A few savvy people catch on that a product is better and it becomes a meme that others rely upon for their decisions.
I do not think that there are enogh savvy-typography-valuing-people to induce some market driving meme. If this was the case Word would have died many years ago...