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Most standard fiction titles and simple with no images and have limited amount of formatting requirements.
Non-fiction titles are charged in a tiered per-page system. After testing hourly rates for a few years, Reality has found that a per-page rate is not only more accurate, it is easier for everyone to understand.
The three tiers below reflect the broadest range of non- fiction titles we have encountered over the years, from easy to complex, from small to large.
Basic titles without footnotes, lists, sidebars, pull quotes, tables or other major complexities. Common examples include memoirs and histories.
Standard titles with a mix of footnotes, lists, unique paragraph formatting, images, tables, sidebars, pull quotes, and other complexities spread throughout Common examples include standard non- fiction, business, theology titles, and titles that require OCR conversion.
Extraordinary titles with complex formatting on every page, two column formatting, extensive foreign languages or symbols, and other complexities. Common examples include chess and poker manuals, dictionaries, Bible commentaries, and complex titles that require OCR conversion.
Children's books and comic books are made up almost exclusively with images. More work is required fro converting these type of books. Interactive content like you see in children's iPhone apps are not possible in eBook formats like Mobipocket/Kindle and ePub. eBooks are limited to flat images and text.
On eBook readers these formats are read on screens of different sizes. Overlaying text on the images is not the best practice for eBooks.
Images may have to be extracted and given the correct size and treatment. Hence we need to see the book to quote based on the time it will take.
Non- fiction books sometimes contain subject indexes. Conversion houses will at times ignore these indexes or just insert them into the eBook without making the page numbers into active links.
Subject indexes are much more than just nicely formatted search results and hence need to be treated such. They are informative lists of what the author may have found to be important categorized with topics and subtopics, related areas of interest, and other helpful information.
However to link an index in an eBook requires the conversion house to put markers in the text and also may require formatting and linking of the index.
ePub has better support for tables but Kindle format does not have such good support for table layouts. Tables may not look good look on smaller screens or in certain eBook reader software. In such case we typically convert all tables into images.
This process ensures that tables will be viewable on all devices. However, sometimes a table cannot be converted into an image. This is true for large tables having a lot of small cells.
Tables can be formatted within the eBook, depending on the eBook format limitations. This process is more time consuming and is costed accordingly.
According to International Digital Publishing forum the ebook market for 1st qtr of 2010 was 91 million USD . It is growing at 190% . (http://www.idpf.org/doc_library/industrystats.htm)
Apple with the launch of iPad which sold over 2 million in 2 months ( May 2010 ) may also be a game changer for ebooks . It will probably get a more multimedia rich genre of book, magazines and animated books to the reading devices.
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