For those who worry about BB and "perfect" eBooks, the following should ease that worry greatly!!! On Wed, 3 Mar 2010, Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
carel said:
Yes, we have been doing a semantic dance
ok, that's kinda what i thought.
I just feel that a final 'proofing' stage before release would assist in locating errors that were either missed or introduced by the processing.
well, having "one more proofing" is _always_ a great thing.
provided that somebody else is willing to _do_ it, that is...
the acid test is whether you deem it to be so necessary that you will do it yourself. that's a nice way to help you decide whether the _cost_ of that additional proofing is _worth_it_, whether it will provide enough _benefit_ in the text accuracy.
once you gain enough trust in your tool and its performance, believe me that you'll decide that it performs "well enough"...
but yes, it is important to gauge the accuracy of your tool...
my goal is less-than-1-error-every-10-pages, and my tool and workflow consistently delivers better results than that.
A human will do the processing and humans can make mistakes and some of the mistakes that could be made in what would be both error and formatting processes could be quite grand.
i don't worry about errors that are "quite grand"... they're easy to spot, and obvious to debug and fix.
my experience is small errors are more troubling...
I feel that a second set of eyes can never be a bad thing when it comes to something like this.
that's easy to say until we ask you to be "the second set" on a million e-texts, all of which are almost perfect now.
you -- and anyone else we ask -- will say "good enough".
at some point, the benefit of greater accuracy isn't worth it.
and then we say, "if the people reading this book because they _want_ to read it cannot find any errors in it, then that's their problem, but we cannot spend any more time having innocent people re-proof this book _once_again_ simply because there _might_ still be an error in the thing."
again, i draw the line quite specifically. if a page has been looked at by 2 people in a row who could not find an error, then i certify that page as "good enough for the public" and stop looking at it. you can make it 1 person, or 3 people, or 4 people or 8 people or 22 people, whatever you like, but nobody would ever suggest we keep proofing a book forever.
now, let me be clear that i understand that you only said "a second set of eyes" and not 22 sets of them. i agree... and that's specifically why i use the comparison method, because it gives us two sets of eyes on a book, essentially.
And, those with less experience (or no experience) in shaping the output of a text may feel more confident about doing the process if they know someone else will provide a checksum for their work before it goes public.
except that the _public_ provides that checksum for them.
they constitute your "second set of eyes", your 3rd, your 23rd.
the text would be released to PG and then should be placed in some environment that allows for editing it to 'perfection.'
it would be nice if p.g. did this. or d.p. but neither does.
-bowerbird