Film, Media & TV4 mins ago
Ebook
7 Answers
What is the process for making an ebook? Considering the amount available, it must be reasonably simple, but I just can't imagine someone typing up whole series of books just to upload them. That is mind-boggling!
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Oh!
With modern day printing, the type is already on computer. The days of setting the type face with individual letters in a big block are long gone.
So whether the finished product is to be a hardback, paperback or eBook the initial process is the same - it has be typed on to a hard disk somewhere along the line.
With modern day printing, the type is already on computer. The days of setting the type face with individual letters in a big block are long gone.
So whether the finished product is to be a hardback, paperback or eBook the initial process is the same - it has be typed on to a hard disk somewhere along the line.
We're getting there, Ethel, just bear with me. Let's take the complete & unabridged works of William Shakespeare. That took him years to do. Someone, or lots of someones, has had to type it all to a hard drive in probably a short space of time. Would that have been at the publishers? That's what I find mind -boggling! It takes me about 10 minutes to do an email!
If I could intrude here ladies, I think what Liz65 is asking is what type of person has the time and/or commitment to devote to typing out a book for uploading?
The time needed to type these works out must be phenomenal given that you can find the complete works of Shakespeare, DIckens and a vast number of others out there.
The time needed to type these works out must be phenomenal given that you can find the complete works of Shakespeare, DIckens and a vast number of others out there.
A few ways.
For older stuff, produced before books were typed on a computer, you can do a few things:
1) (Mainly an older technique now I'd guess.) Just pay someone to copy it out by hand. Long and laborious, but they get paid.
2) You can get machines to turn pages of a book, and then scan them into a computer. Or at the very least, have someone turn the pages of the book then put it on a scanner.
For (2), once in the machine, you can use OCR software to let the computer read the text, if that needs to be done. This can either be done by sophisticated software, or a few other methods.
One clever method is using CAPTCHAs. A CAPTCHA is a method of stopping spam on websites. You've probably seen them. Before you sign up for a service on some website, you may be shown an image with some letters jumbled up, with some wavy lines or something. They're designed to be easy for a human to read, but hard for a computer. So you enter the letters correctly, and then pass the test (you're not a spam machine just making fake accounts).
But instead of this image just being random letters or words, you could tie it up with picking some words that the OCR machine reading books can't properly understand. This way, the human wins (they get into the website), and the computer does too, meaning that more of your books can be understood by computer.
For older stuff, produced before books were typed on a computer, you can do a few things:
1) (Mainly an older technique now I'd guess.) Just pay someone to copy it out by hand. Long and laborious, but they get paid.
2) You can get machines to turn pages of a book, and then scan them into a computer. Or at the very least, have someone turn the pages of the book then put it on a scanner.
For (2), once in the machine, you can use OCR software to let the computer read the text, if that needs to be done. This can either be done by sophisticated software, or a few other methods.
One clever method is using CAPTCHAs. A CAPTCHA is a method of stopping spam on websites. You've probably seen them. Before you sign up for a service on some website, you may be shown an image with some letters jumbled up, with some wavy lines or something. They're designed to be easy for a human to read, but hard for a computer. So you enter the letters correctly, and then pass the test (you're not a spam machine just making fake accounts).
But instead of this image just being random letters or words, you could tie it up with picking some words that the OCR machine reading books can't properly understand. This way, the human wins (they get into the website), and the computer does too, meaning that more of your books can be understood by computer.
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