I mentioned a few days ago that I'd bought Harry Harrison's "Skyfall" (a book published by SF Gateway) and been very disappointed with the quality, and that I'd written to the publisher. I've received a very detailed reply from them this morning, which gives me hope for the future. Part of that reply I've quoted below:
Quote:
Thank you for bringing this to our attention - and apologies for the poor state of the book. You're quite right to expect better; we expect better of ourselves, too.
After the launch of SF Gateway and the frantic burst of activity that produced 1,000 eBooks in a year, from a standing start, we realised that a few of our titles had problems. Our conversion house had promised us a 99.995% level of accuracy, but it became apparent that, while the majority of titles were fine, there was a small but unsatisfactory number for which that level of accuracy was not reached.
We spent the better part of last year pushing our conversion house to live up to their promise (resulting in them instituting vastly improved processes) and also put on place a more robust quality control procedure in-house. Alongside our new release publishing, we have been going over files produced under the previous systems and repairing them when necessary. We had, in fact, re-checked more than half of our Harry Harrison titles, but obviously Skyfall was one we hadn't got to.
We've now looked over the book and we're very disappointed with the quality. We have withdrawn the title from sale and will be having the file re-proofed, repaired and redistributed to the retailers. Amazon should let you know when the corrected version is available and you'll be able to download it free of charge as an update. This process shouldn't take more than a few weeks.
You have our unreserved apology for the state of this file. It's not indicative of the overall quality of our eBooks and we hope that it won't put you off continuing to explore our titles.
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It's good to see a publisher putting processes in place to correct such issues.