Quote:
Originally Posted by m00min
I couldn't agree more. No ebook gets loaded onto my reader without first exploding it in Calibre, ripping out the crappy CSS and replacing it with something sane.
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Seriously? I'd rather return a really badly formatted book than fix it before actually reading it. How do you not get spoiled that way? It doesn't sound like a lot of fun.
Quote:
Originally Posted by m00min
My bugbear is seeing italic and bold text marked up with spans. It's not semantic, it's lazy.
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See, that's why I think you're a bit obsessive-compulsive there (no offense intended). I agree that it's bad (X)HTML/CSS practice, but I'm not writing a website or
designing an ebook, I'm
reading one. And in this case I couldn't care less
how they code their italics as long as they're there.
Quote:
Originally Posted by m00min
Books with missing scene gaps, missing italics (not even done in the aforementioned lazy way), hard coded hyphenation. Really, it's enough to make me pirate on principle. Almost.
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Missing scene gaps and missing italics would be annoying, but, honestly, I haven't bought too many books with those in them in the last years.
What I'm trying to say is: I do believe that the content trumps the presentation to some reasonable extent. I'd like my scene gaps and chapter breaks to be in there; I'd like the text to be complete and formatted in a way that I can see italics and bold, but that's about it. One or two messed up scene gaps in a novel I'll probably shrug off. While I find typos annyoing, I can kind of tolerate them if they aren't too numerous. Margins too wide? I'll adjust on my Sony -- takes me about 10 seconds. HTML/CSS "errors" (hardcoded hyphenation, italics as spans, whatever) -- I don't care at all; I won't even notice.
I get that when you're working in design or typesetting, these things will be more obvious (and thus annoying) to you, so I guess I'm just glad that I get to enjoy my books for the stories in them more easily.
Matt