Intriguing service
New service from Data Conversion Labs: Books2Bytes.com, which takes paper and turns it into ASCII or Word. My ex-employer had better watch out; they are in this biz too, or used to be.
I would trust DCL with work, no question. I know a couple of those folks, and I read a lot of their stuff on a regular basis. They know what they’re doing. I’ve yet to catch them out. (Necessary disclaimer: I did a weekend’s worth of contract work for DCL once. That and the OEBF are the extent of my contact with DCL. They sure aren’t paying me to say nice things about them, never have, and probably never will.)
More to the point, they’ve been very careful about the parameters of this service. You do not get a typeset book out the back end, nor do you get any kind of markup. If you want Word styles, it’s extra. This is good. The focus means they can develop lean, mean workflows. It also means they won’t promise the moon to everyone (as another ex-employer was in the habit of doing).
I do wonder about their ASCII service, though. Surely they’ll do Unicode, in order to keep smart quotes and similar niceties? If not, I would absolutely demand Word. No excuse for losing typographic characters. None. I suspect, however, that they’re saying ASCII when what they mean is Unicode-or-ASCII; not everybody understands what Unicode is.
I admit I clicked on the link because I had the sinking feeling they were muscling in on what I hope will be Text Artisan Guild’s turf: reclamation of electronic typesetting data, in current and obsolete formats, into SGML or XML. (Especially obsolete formats. I’m salivating at all the Penta work there must be, now that Penta is dead.)
But they’re not, at least not with this. TAG isn’t going to do paper. Nuh-uh. That takes serious infrastructure, that does.
(Oh, and in case anyone from DCL is reading: No, TAG isn’t going to mooch on your turf either. TAG wants the customers and jobs too small or fiddly to be profitable for you. TAG doesn’t want—couldn’t even do—the large-volume and ongoing jobs that are your bread and butter.)
I’m happy. I’m meditating a “TAG recommends…” page, and this is one more good service to put on it.