MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Chapter markers: why oh why do so many books not have them?

chyron8472 · 02-20-2011, 08:04 AM

Ignorance is no excuse.

If you hand in a paper at school that is not properly formatted, you're still getting marks taken off, even if you tell the teacher that you didn't know how to use the software properly.

And chapter markers are a really easy thing to check and make sure they work. Kindle Previewer (provided by Amazon to help authors/publishers) makes it quite obvious when they don't work right.

...also it would be one thing if these were minor publications or or some such, but these people are being paid real money. They're real, big time authors and publishers.

I mean, really. I bought the Lord of the Rings 25th anniversary ebook, and since the NCX was in multi-level format it meant that this ebook didn't know to obviously navigate to more than just the starting locations of the 3 novels in the trilogy. You might tell me that the markers for the chapters are there and only hidden, but I'm not sure that they were working right at all. All I know is, converting with calibre fixed the problem.

For a second example, I bought Star Trek: New Frontier, which includes the first 4 books in the New Frontier series. The author, Peter David, has written quite a number of books and is one of my favorite authors. The publisher for this book is Pocket Books, which is a rather large publishing company.

This ebook not only had a multi-level NCX-- which I can personally confirm (due to how long it took me to figure out how to fix) that the hidden chapter markers only went to the 2nd tier of locations and not the 3rd, which is where at least half of them are-- but also there was no Table of Contents at all. No Table of Contents. Calibre had to create one, and could only do so properly after I converted to ePub, used Sigil's TOC Editor and converted back.

These are not indie publishers or little-known authors. There's no reason for these things to happen.

Ignorance is no excuse. Laziness is no excuse. These people are professionals, being paid by (tens/hundreds of) thousands of people who want to read their work. They should do a better job.

02-20-2011, 08:04 AM	#14
chyron8472 Groupie Posts: 180 Karma: 558490 Join Date: Jan 2011 Device: Kindle 5, Amazon Fire 5th Gen, Moto Z Play Droid	Ignorance is no excuse. If you hand in a paper at school that is not properly formatted, you're still getting marks taken off, even if you tell the teacher that you didn't know how to use the software properly. And chapter markers are a really easy thing to check and make sure they work. Kindle Previewer (provided by Amazon to help authors/publishers) makes it quite obvious when they don't work right. ...also it would be one thing if these were minor publications or or some such, but these people are being paid real money. They're real, big time authors and publishers. I mean, really. I bought the Lord of the Rings 25th anniversary ebook, and since the NCX was in multi-level format it meant that this ebook didn't know to obviously navigate to more than just the starting locations of the 3 novels in the trilogy. You might tell me that the markers for the chapters are there and only hidden, but I'm not sure that they were working right at all. All I know is, converting with calibre fixed the problem. For a second example, I bought Star Trek: New Frontier, which includes the first 4 books in the New Frontier series. The author, Peter David, has written quite a number of books and is one of my favorite authors. The publisher for this book is Pocket Books, which is a rather large publishing company. This ebook not only had a multi-level NCX-- which I can personally confirm (due to how long it took me to figure out how to fix) that the hidden chapter markers only went to the 2nd tier of locations and not the 3rd, which is where at least half of them are-- but also there was no Table of Contents at all. No Table of Contents. Calibre had to create one, and could only do so properly after I converted to ePub, used Sigil's TOC Editor and converted back. These are not indie publishers or little-known authors. There's no reason for these things to happen. Ignorance is no excuse. Laziness is no excuse. These people are professionals, being paid by (tens/hundreds of) thousands of people who want to read their work. They should do a better job. Last edited by chyron8472; 02-20-2011 at 08:40 AM.