Mediabistro’s Ebooknewser reports that publisher John Wiley & Sons will be converting 660 titles from its popular “For Dummies” series to EPUB, using Easypress’s EasyEPUB process that is made to work with large volumes of files.
The article quotes Steve Arany, Wiley’s automation manager, as being optimistic about the quality provided by the conversion. “EasyEPUB solves many problems for us by using its software to deliver the conversions directly from our layout files, while maintaining the ‘Dummies’ branding.”
I’m more than a little curious how well that is going to work. If they’re actually using the same files that were used to create the print books, rather than relying on OCR, there should at least theoretically be fewer quality issues. On the other hand, any large-scale automated process provides ample opportunities for quality issues to turn up.
A number of Dummies titles are already available electronically, of course, such as those for the Kindle. But this means a whole lot more of the technical series will become available electronically—even if it will probably have DRM added most places.
