Buyer's Guide: Ebook Conversion Strategies Buoyed by Vendor Partnerships
As digital publishing proliferates, healthy vendor partnerships are important as ever.
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Bill Kasdorf
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only<%2Fspan>%20ones%20who%20knew%20how%20to%20do%20that%20work.%20As%20they%20struggled%20to%20make%20the%20transition%20from%20print%20to%20digital,%20publishers%20had%20to%20rely%20on%20that.%20It%20worked%20then%20and%20it%20still%20does.%20It's%20how%20the%20vast%20majority%20of%20digital%20publications%20are%20made.<%2Fspan>%0D%0A%0D%0Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.bookbusinessmag.com%2Farticle%2Fas-digital-publishing-proliferates-healthy-vendor-partnerships-important-ever%2F" target="_blank" class="email" data-post-id="3324" type="icon_link">
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- "We've been getting XML from our vendors for the past ten years. I have a drawer full of CDs. Every book we've published. We've just discovered that we have a mess on our hands because the XML is totally inconsistent. We're going to have to start over."
- "We sent our top 5,000 books out to get them converted to EPUBs. We thought we could use the XML—EPUB is XML, right?—for archiving and repurposing. Turns out it's useless for that. We're going to have to start over."
- "We've been careful to make sure our EPUBs work in every possible device. So we've pared down the specs so there's nothing in them that doesn't work in the most brain-dead ereader. The problem is that they are terrible. Our customers hate them. We're going to have to start over."
Those are all true stories. Did their vendors cheat them? Absolutely not. All of those publishers got exactly what they contracted for. So what was the problem? The problem was that they treated the vendor like a sausage machine. They probably bid the work out to a bunch of vendors with few if any specs and picked the cheapest one. They just dumped their content on the poor vendor and said "give me XML," or "give me EPUBs," or "give me EPUBs and make sure they work everywhere." What did they get? Sausage.
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