MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Are some publishers doing a better job than others?

ATDrake · 01-09-2011, 01:09 PM

I've noticed that smaller houses like Kensington seem to do a beautiful job with their books (admittedly, I get the free ones so maybe the quality drops with the non-promo paid stuff) better than the majors, usually.

Few if any noticeable typo/scannos, formatting neatly done (curly quotes, no-indent on first paragraph in a section), proper table of contents and flickable chapter marks in the Kindle editions.

And while Random House may turn off TTS, they've been pretty good about putting some of their backlist books up and doing a better-than-decent conversion job and pricing them reasonably, at least for the ones I've tried.

They recently made an effort to put up the early Elizabeth Macpherson mysteries by Sharyn McCrumb (originally published in paperback late 80s-early 90s) from the very 1st onward (released Nov 2010) and have been pricing them around $5-6 after standard discounts. And the two Barbara Hambly Benjamin January mysteries I splurged on in e-book and also have the original hardcover editions for (published early 2000s) do a very nice job "replicating" the print editions, using the fancy chapter heading graphics and including all the maps and genealogy tables and such (no covers, though).

While the layout seems a little inconsistent (first para no-indent on some books, but not others; looks like someone messed up the style sheets for those titles), the actual texts were in pretty good shape, for the ones I've bought, at least.

01-09-2011, 01:09 PM	#4
ATDrake Wizzard Posts: 11,517 Karma: 33048258 Join Date: Mar 2010 Location: Roundworld Device: Kindle 2 International, Sony PRS-T1, BlackBerry PlayBook, Acer Iconia	I've noticed that smaller houses like Kensington seem to do a beautiful job with their books (admittedly, I get the free ones so maybe the quality drops with the non-promo paid stuff) better than the majors, usually. Few if any noticeable typo/scannos, formatting neatly done (curly quotes, no-indent on first paragraph in a section), proper table of contents and flickable chapter marks in the Kindle editions. And while Random House may turn off TTS, they've been pretty good about putting some of their backlist books up and doing a better-than-decent conversion job and pricing them reasonably, at least for the ones I've tried. They recently made an effort to put up the early Elizabeth Macpherson mysteries by Sharyn McCrumb (originally published in paperback late 80s-early 90s) from the very 1st onward (released Nov 2010) and have been pricing them around $5-6 after standard discounts. And the two Barbara Hambly Benjamin January mysteries I splurged on in e-book and also have the original hardcover editions for (published early 2000s) do a very nice job "replicating" the print editions, using the fancy chapter heading graphics and including all the maps and genealogy tables and such (no covers, though). While the layout seems a little inconsistent (first para no-indent on some books, but not others; looks like someone messed up the style sheets for those titles), the actual texts were in pretty good shape, for the ones I've bought, at least.