Quote:
Originally Posted by hwlester
One reason I remove DRM and clean up the EPUBs before putting them on my reader. It seems that many books rely on metadata accompanying the download to display the cover properly on the reader. I side load 90% or more of my books, so I like to have proper covers in the eBook itself.
I'm a little more understanding when there are errors in older books that were obviously OCR'd with minimal proofreading, but on modern books, I'm less tolerant of mistakes in the eBook that don't appear in the print version.
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Last few books I got, had crap covers generated from a macro, with some bland background, and text slapped on of the Author's name and the title. What was really frustrating was that the proper cover was shown on the site when I got the books. Random House I know does this, one book I have from them with this is Rapacia: the Second Circle of Heck by Dale E. Basye. It is a solid black background, with gold text with title, subtitle, author, illustrator, and the Random House logo. I have a few others, from some of their sublabels, and those are very ugly. One from the Delacorte imprint, tiled background of a pale blue chicken, title in red Times New Roman, author in blue Times New Roman.
Some of the books I have, use bad scans of the title page for the cover. Stephen King's back catalog seems to be really bad about this. Gerald's Game originally included a drawing for the background of the Title Page, but it was scanned in as black/white, so with the shading, the drawing is almost totally black. It's also fairly pixelated.
I mean, it just pisses me off. If you want me to pay as much or more for an ebook, I want it to be at least of the same quality as the paper book. Way I look at it, I am getting a lower quality product (bad scans, missing or shoddy covers) with more restrictions (no lending, no resale, often no refunds), so I shouldn't be expected to pay as much. Instead, whenever I buy a book, if I want it to look presentable, I am expected to strip the DRM, find and insert a scan of the normal cover, and correct typos from OCR errors. Plus, I've had to prune the tags on the ebooks, because not that long ago my wife's PRS300 started locking up, because it got bogged down with the number of tags on the books. She has about 400 books on her reader, and some of the books had an insane amount of tags. One had 65(!) tags. Which also, the Sony readers have Collections, that generate based on tags. She had more pages of collections (with 10 per page) than she had total books on her reader.