Someone who knows how to write code/scripts could come up with something for footnotes. The entire "make ebook" part is easy--you only have to figure out how once, and find ways to streamline/batch as much as possible of it. It takes a substantial portion of working time once the system is set up--but the process itself is simple, just time-consuming.
Harder stuff is "decide on CSS details with enough variation that all your books don't wind up looking identical," but that's still potentially part of setup arrangements. (And it's a "you decide" thing.)
Dealing with someone else's scans is a nightmare. Dealing with "the only known copy of this book is a 1963 collector's edition paperback with a crumbling spine; DO NOT DAMAGE the original" is a nightmare. Dealing with color-coded maps on yellowing paper is trouble. Dealing with "so, what do you do when the author hasn't paid you yet?" is icky, especially if you know how tight a budget the author's working under.
I've put serious thought into "could I do this as a business," and eventually came up with, "probably, but the first four months would be borderline-starvation, and ick, I'd have to run a business." I'm currently looking for someone else who wants to run an ebook conversion business and will hire me to do formatting & OCR corrections, and the occasional weird image-editing job.
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Harder stuff is "decide on CSS details with enough variation that all your books don't wind up looking identical," but that's still potentially part of setup arrangements. (And it's a "you decide" thing.)
Dealing with someone else's scans is a nightmare. Dealing with "the only known copy of this book is a 1963 collector's edition paperback with a crumbling spine; DO NOT DAMAGE the original" is a nightmare. Dealing with color-coded maps on yellowing paper is trouble. Dealing with "so, what do you do when the author hasn't paid you yet?" is icky, especially if you know how tight a budget the author's working under.
I've put serious thought into "could I do this as a business," and eventually came up with, "probably, but the first four months would be borderline-starvation, and ick, I'd have to run a business." I'm currently looking for someone else who wants to run an ebook conversion business and will hire me to do formatting & OCR corrections, and the occasional weird image-editing job.