The Dresden Files > DF Spoilers
Any news on Peace Talks
TrueMonk:
So both amazon, a danish bookstore and some other place has set the release date to 16th of April. Is that just because one of them guessed and the others are copying?
https://www.amazon.com/Peace-Talks-Dresden-Files-Sixteen-ebook/dp/B07SZLRHMT
https://www.saxo.com/dk/peace-talks_jim-butcher_hardback_9780356500911
https://www.risingshadow.net/library/book/43381-peace-talks
Dina:
I am sad to disappoint you, but I believe Amazon has said so long before de book was finished, so it is not very reliable. But... Who knows? Perhaps they knew...
Bad Alias:
--- Quote from: Kindler on November 20, 2019, 07:49:49 PM ---I've read some pirated copies of Jim's books (I had already purchased the eBook iterations, but needed EPUBs with no DRM so I could copy + paste from it for some presentations on modern novels; I'd never steal from Jim).
...
But anyway, word processors tend to interpret all of the formatting in a PDF precisely. So the end of a line in a PDF will get a hard line break when you copy and paste it into Microsoft Word. That means you have all of these weird paragraphs with random breaks spread across a whole document. It's a real pain to clean that kind of thing up (there is no quick fix; you have to go through it and delete the breaks, fix the spacing, etc.)
--- End quote ---
I remove the DRM protections from any epub I get my hands on. I've pulled all the short stories out and put them in there own epub file. I've also changed the names of the books (and short stories) so that they are in chronological order (First Fistful of Warlocks to that most recent Christmas story that I haven't done yet).
I have to copy information from some actual real physical documents for new documents for work. Actually did it today. OCR on scanners has gotten a lot better, but a lot of those problems still come up. On the one today 1/2" appeared in the document three or four times. The OCR got it right once. I also come across a lot of forms that are part of a paper that are pdfs. Point being, I've done the whole turn a pdf into a word doc thing a few times. It's all still so much quicker than transcribing it.
Kindler:
Oh yeah, there's a reason I went through the obnoxiousness of doing it that way. When I'm dealing with 150k word documents, I'm not going to spend several eight-hour days typing everything out.
And to be fair, the latest iteration of the Adobe Cloud suite's Acrobat Pro does a reasonably good job of exporting PDF to Word. Still get a lot of the line break weirdness, and God help you if there are any design-y elements, but at least most of the paragraphs remain, you know, paragraphs. The thing with the quotation marks often depends on whether or not the original document used the fancy "smart quotes," which are stylized and curve toward the enclosed word (the ones in this post do not have smart quotes, so they'd be fine about 95% of the time).
I was doing this as a side gig about 10-11 years ago, when eBooks were still in their infancy. Sigil wasn't released yet, and Calibre didn't have any editing capability at the time (if it even supported EPUBs, I can't really remember). Big chunks of the work was done using Word's HTML editing. I don't know if that's possible in Office 365 anymore—at least, not like it used to be. Back then, a lot of the publishers I'd worked with were still using PageMaker or Quark. InDesign had replaced both pretty completely in terms of feature offerings years earlier. Publishers have never been precisely quick on the uptake of new things, though.
So, they'd lay these books out in PageMaker, and refuse to provide me with the source document—neither the Quark or the PM file, nor the Word/WordPerfect/Scrivener/whateverthehell the author used ("PROPRIETARY," they'd shout. "YOU COULDN'T POSSIBLY NEED THAT!!!") I'd have to make do with the PDFs they provided. Thus did I venture boldly into the unknown field of eBook preparation.
At the time, I was freelancing as a writer/editor, and it was a random gig I was offered by one of my clients (these are smaller publishers, before most of them got eaten by Penguin, Harlequin, and the other few Last Men Standing). Sort of a, "Hey, can you turn this document into one of those electronic books?"
I kinda knew what I was doing, but not really. But when you freelance, there's no such thing as a job you can't do. "Sure, I've done that plenty of times! Send over the file, and I'll give you an estimate." That night, I downloaded a ton of software to see if I could find a solution that's basically automated, but none existed. It was pure grunt work. The next three weeks were dedicated to learning HTML as I went, which was easier than I thought it'd be (syntax, yo). I had to learn all about the ways PDF screws you over. But hey, I got it done, and the publisher paid more for that job than they ever did for editing. That's the value of a totally separate skill set, I guess. So I started offering that to these small publishing houses looking to break into this whole "digital book" thing.
Now that whole job would be just about done just during the editing phase. As long as your breaks are in all the right places and you use MS Word styles correctly, generating a clean EPUB or MOBI is pretty much a matter of file conversion. Can take a little finagling, but not much, and you can do spot-fixes quickly in Sigil. So they can do the print layout in Word or whatever for the most part, and can basically just convert that source file to whatever you want.
Kids these days have it easy, I tell ya huwhat.
spiritofair:
In other words, as I suspected, there is absolutely no excuse not to publish a book quickly after it is done.
If we have to wait until July, then either the book isn't actually done (which seems unlikely), the editor at Penguin is absolutely buried or on sabbatical or something, Penguin wants to wait for some crazy indecipherable reason, or Penguin is incompetent.
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