Deeper Wizardry

Diane Duane tells us she's working on getting her Young Wizards novels ready for electronic publishing.  (Sadly, most of you out there are probably scratching your heads and saying, "Huh? Is that anything like Harry Potter?" Well, yeah, I suppose so, except these came first and are better-written.)

Since Duane is not herself a wizard — not that she's admitting to in public, at any rate — she's finding the conversion process just as frustrating and complex as any of us mere mortals. But she at least got to take one shortcut that had me laughing out loud in delight:

"And then of course there's the issue of where to get electronic texts to correct for books that were originally, you know, typed on paper. …What, scan them? In my thousands of hours of spare time? I don't think so. Why do that when various well-intentioned people have over time scanned my earliest books, sometimes even run them through several people to proof them, and then made them available via P2P? So I borrowed those texts back, thank you very much, and used them for my basic documents. (And in all cases, they still needed to be corrected. Sometimes the people doing the original scanning were none too sure of what a word meant, or how to spell it. I fortunately don't have this problem.)"

via dduane: Ebooks: a note from the pro-am self-pub frontier.

That's one way to make lemonade out of lemons, all right.  And what exactly are the book pirates going to do — take her to court for stealing their work?  Brilliant.