Yes, that was "Mind-sifter" by Shirley S. Maiewski, the final story in Star Trek: The New Voyages.
More Trek Novel Reprints!
- Thread starter shanejayell
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Yes, that was "Mind-sifter" by Shirley S. Maiewski, the final story in Star Trek: The New Voyages.
I'll look into creating a specific page (or section thereof) on removing Clippy, just for you CLB. That way you'll have no excuse for not knowing both Scotty's age(s) and how to disable Clippy!
But at the price S&S is charging for reprints? Do you really want to pay that much?
But cannot Wordperfect output in RTF which then Word can read and then you can fix up whatever needs fixing from there. Seems silly that S&S cannot handle Wordperfect when it's so easy to do. And doesn't Word read it?
That would be too much work for us authors, to have to keep abreast of all the publisher's style sheets and formatting guidelines and have to do all that mechanical work ourselves to get it to look right. And it would take work away from the typesetters and art directors and so forth who are responsible for that end of the process. It doesn't make sense as a division of labor. We writers handle the creative end of the process, then turn it over to other people whose specialty is preparing a manuscript for publication. Remember, these days the process of copyediting, typesetting, formatting, etc. is identical for both print and electronic books up until the point when the final print-ready document file is sent to either the printer or the eBook distributor.
Heck, I don't even know what "ePub" means. I leave that to the professionals.
Well, maybe WordPerfect isn't the problem? That was just a wild guess on my part. Again, I've never talked to anybody at S&S about this . . . . .
S&S keep f***ing up the eBooks through. Whoever they have working for them to do it (presumably a team) doesn't know their asses from elbows. The formatting is all over the place. Section breaks without markings, justification imperfect, etc. For Kindle and ePub versions.
Marco did once say, here, that the problem was that the novels not yet released in eBook had no readable electronic version still on file at S&S, and would require retyping, reformatting, new galleys, etc. IIRC.
Actually, it's not as much work as you think to create an eBook from your source. Given all the errors and other errors I've seen in Seize the Fire, I don't think you could do it any worse. Nobody did get back and tell us which of the errors I pointed out also are in the pBook. But I do think at least some of the errors come from the people making the eBook. My guess is that they started off with a PDF source and that's one of the worst sources to use to to make an eBook.
I have never heard, seen,or read about any way to convert a novel length PDF into any other format without errors. And the problem is that the people making the Trek eBooks for S&S are not bothering to proof them. So we are getting higher prices and lower quality.
Heck, I could take your documents and make eBooks out of them and if the documents didn't contain errors, the eBooks would not either.
Why not go back to the authors and get an electronic copy? Or is that too sensible? Heck, when I made the eBook versions of of Music of the Spheres, I got the source from Margaret and worked from there.
I should make an ePub version of that since one doesn't exist.
But really, there has to be some other reason why some trek books do not have eBook versions.
You seem to be thinking only about the process of electronic conversion. I'm talking about all the design, stylistic, and typesetting decisions that have to be made in order to convert a raw, double-spaced word-processor document in Courier or Times New Roman on 8.5x11" page format into a professional-looking, single-spaced, book-formatted document in a custom font, complete with chapter-heading graphics, page headers, copyright page, indicia, and the like. Determining the look and style of the book is the responsibility of the editor and the publisher's art department. It shouldn't be the writer's responsibility, any more than cinematography or makeup should be a screenwriter's responsibility. It's something best done by people who specialize in it. Sure, we writers could learn to do our own typesetting and graphic design and stuff, just like anyone who does self-publishing, but why should we have to when the publisher is already paying other people who specialize in those things? It makes more sense for us to focus on the actual writing, and on our day jobs if we have them.
With older books, it's possible that nobody still has an electronic copy floating around. I might have an old floppy disk with Assignment: Eternity on it stuck in a closet somewhere, but I wouldn't stake my life on it. Once the books are published, I tend to delete the files from my computer.
(On the other hand, just the other day, my girlfriend finally convinced me to throw out some old-fashioned loose floppies that still had my first book on them . . . .)
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Hmm. I keep electronic copies of everything. Well, not really everything, because I don't always save earlier drafts of works in progress (instead just overwriting them during revisions), unless the changes are major enough to warrant saving them in a separate file. Or rather, these days I save major revisions as separate files, but I didn't always do so in the past. Sometimes I regret that, because I lose things I might've been able to draw on. For instance, I could swear I wrote a version of a particular story in which I played around with a really unusual use of language for an alien species, but I can't find a copy of that version in my files, just earlier ones. Either something was lost in a transition between computers, or I never actually wrote it at all except in my head.
But if the publisher is not printing the pBook and there is no eBook, then there is no income from the book. Given the proliferation of eBook readers, you have a chance to make some money should an eBook be released.
I know the authors should not have to make the eBook, but in this case, the publisher dropped the ball and the current staff are a waste of space.
But, again, you're assuming that we're book designers or computer programmers, and that we actually have anything to do with this.
Publishers have ebook departments. Writers don't tell them how to run their business--especially when the books don't even belong to us. We're just freelancers here.
Greg, Christopher, and all other writers. More and more people are moving to eBooks and when they buy said eBooks and find them poorly formatted, they may (if they're like the idiots I used to happen across frequently in my then line of work) might think it is poorly written.
Yes, that line of logic and reasoning is deeply flawed (and probably needs years of therapy to correct) but there it is. All I want to know is who is in charge of S&S's eBook division (and I'm sincerely hoping it isn't some Howard Wallowitz-type sitting in his mother's basement surrounded by computers or a bunch of moronic monkeys being whipped by a mad editor) so I can email them a list of corrections and ask them a lot of polite questions.
It's really not that difficult to turn an electronic ms. into ePub or whatever. IIRC, Michael Stackpole told me he could do it in about 20 hours and has done it a number of his own books. I realize you guys don't own the ST novels (or others) that you write for media tie-ins but if it does take about 3 working days to do (maybe two weeks if you're writing other stuff too) I think all of us eBook readers would be appreciative.
Yes, that line of logic and reasoning is deeply flawed (and probably needs years of therapy to correct) but there it is. All I want to know is who is in charge of S&S's eBook division (and I'm sincerely hoping it isn't some Howard Wallowitz-type sitting in his mother's basement surrounded by computers or a bunch of moronic monkeys being whipped by a mad editor) so I can email them a list of corrections and ask them a lot of polite questions.
It's really not that difficult to turn an electronic ms. into ePub or whatever. IIRC, Michael Stackpole told me he could do it in about 20 hours and has done it a number of his own books. I realize you guys don't own the ST novels (or others) that you write for media tie-ins but if it does take about 3 working days to do (maybe two weeks if you're writing other stuff too) I think all of us eBook readers would be appreciative.
Nothing we can do about that. It's not our end of the process. As Greg said, we're just freelancers. The publisher hires us to write books that they own and publish.
I have absolutely no information on that subject. I'm not involved with the production end of the process, except when I'm sent the galleys for proofreading.
As you say, we don't own them, so I don't think we'd have the right to do any such thing. Original fiction would be another matter. But I, for one, wouldn't know where to begin. I'm not that computer-savvy. I still don't have a clue what an "ePub" even is, unless it's a virtual tavern for British websurfers.
Because there was not a contractual requirement for manuscripts to be submitted on disk until the early 90s. Some manuscripts may well have been written on typewriters.
Marco once said that Simon & Schuster had some in electronic form, but those files were either corrupted or incompatible with the new tech. Some had gone missing. It sounds so easy to say, "Get a secretary to ask the authors to find their old files and send them to us", but all of that takes time and money. Therefore: a budget. For eBooks that weren't necessarily going to earn very much for the time and money outlaid.
(Some authors had also "moved on" - several were unable to even be located for interview for the Jeff Ayers' book on the making of ST fiction.)
So the manuscripts that need to be completely retyped are on the bottom of a slush pile and can only be attended to as the budget permits. That was before the bottom fell out of Pocket's original eBook market. It sounds like S&S fired a lot of their original eBook team. They probably outsource to a freelancer these days.
For what it's worth, I appreciate your concerns. I've never seen the ebook version of one of my books, but I admit I wince at the thought of any of my books being badly formatted. I spend hours reviewing the page proofs of my books with a red pencil to try to winnow out any infelicities. I certainly don't want readers to have to struggle to read my books.
That being said, I have no idea who is charge of ebooks and am in no position to institute any changes. Plus, I think it's wrong to assume that "it's really not that difficult" for those of us who are total technophobes. Just because we write STAR TREK stories doesn't mean we aren't intimidated by this stuff in real life!
(You're talking to someone who has never tweeted, texted, skyped, or torrented. I don't own an ebook reader, a smartphone, or a laptop, and recently wasted two full days trying to figure out how to get the headphones on my girlfriend's computer to work--and failed miserably!)
So, yeah, I don't pretend to think that I could do a better job turning my novels into ebooks. Heck, I wouldn't even know where to begin . . . .
P.S. Sorry for the rant, but you pushed one of my buttons. The older I get, the touchier I get about the general assumption, especially among tech-saavy sf fans, that "everybody" knows how to navigate the latest hot technology.
I started out writing horror stories on an electric typewriter. Like many writers, I'm not a scientist or an engineer. You can't just assume that all Trekkies are computer whizzes.
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