[AlexBell]

There have been several threads complaining about the number of typos in ebooks etc. Most of the discussions have been about the causes of the shoddy productions, but I would like to try to do something to improve the situation.

We all know that there are many ebooks which are produced very well indeed, as well as any print book. But we also know that many ebooks are so poorly produced that most of us would be ashamed to have them go out over our signature.

My idea has two parts
1. That we name poorly produced books and their publishers, giving details of the faults;
2. That we let the publisher know that we have done so, including at least the name of the thread on this forum.

I hope in this way to motivate the publisher to correct the faults for the sake of continuing to make sales.

I'll start with Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser, published by HarperCollins UK. It is an ePub, and I read it on my ECO Reader.

To start with it has wide left and right margins, so that only 68mm of the 92mm wide screen is available for text. Even worse there is a quote from another book as a preface, and this quote is in a column only 28mm wide. It looks ridiculous.

Each chapter in the book starts on a new page, which I like. But the text of each new chapter starts 75mm down the 125mm screen.

One of the charms of the Flashman series is that Mr. Fraser gives several footnotes providing historical background. But the superscript in this ebook is the same size font as the rest of the text, which require a bigger line space and is very distracting. Even worse, although the links work to take one from the text to the footnote they do not work to take one from the footnote back to the text.

There are a disgraceful number of typos scattered throughout the text. Flashman appears as Flash-man several times, FU appears in a sentence and makes the meaning incomprehensible, and If! occurs where the text calls for If I. And there are many other typos.

I certainly would not have bought this book if I had know how badly formatted it is.

Regards, Alex

PS. I suggest that this thread be restricted to complaints about poor formatting and typos, and that the name of the book, publisher, format, and ebook reader used be included in the review.

Still no response from HarperCollins. When I went into the HTML to try to fix the typos I found that my HTML editor could not read it; it looks like machine code to my untutored ey.