image heavy books, any experiences?

[huari]

Hi,

It's been 4 days in, and I've been enjoying my kindle and snacking on many samples. I've already bought 2 books and scoured the wonderful community aggregates of public domain works.

Most of the content is text rich so my kindle has no trouble, but I want to get a couple of books that are image and table rich. While I can barely make out the diagrams, they are still readable in the sample, but I wonder if the whole book will be like that. As a test, I compared the sample to the hard copy at a bookstore and it was not rendered as well on the kindle. I wonder if there is any quailty control on conversions to the kindle format.

Has anyone gotten a kindle book which was picture rich, but had to return it within the 7 day return period, because the tables and images just weren't readable

[JSWolf]

If as we surmized, AZW eBooks are just Mobipocket with a slightly different DRm, then you'll find a lot of AZW/Mobipocket eBooks to have smallish images. This is based on old technology since Mobipocket format was originally created for PDA sized screens.

What you can do is buy the eBook in MS Reader format, remove the DRM with ConvertLIT and hope the images are large enough. I've found most MS Reader eBooks with images to be fine. Not all are of course. But when you purchase a Mobipocket eBook that has images you need to be able to see, you do take more of a risk then if you purchased the same eBook in MS Reader format.

As an example of poor images.. I tried to borrow the Winston Churchill WWII eBooks (in Mobipocket format) and found the images too small to be of any use. Thus the eBooks were rather not all that readable.

[HarryT]

That's the fault of the book creator. Using the modern book creation tools there's no reason at all to have poor images in a MobiPocket/Kindle book.

Take a look at any of the illustrated books I've uploaded here - eg the Jane Austen or Charles Dickens books; I think you'll find the illustrations in those to be entirely satisfactory.

[huari]

Thank you both for your informative replies.
In this rush to put out the back catalogs, perhaps the publishers have forgotten the art of book creation. Perhaps there is a new market opportunity for finely crafted ebooks in the antiquarian tradition. I for one would certainly enjoy them.

Best,
tony

[MoSo]

Re: the "other" kind of images.

I downloaded a couple of samples of technical books, and all of them had problems with formatting. If you are interested in reading something equation-heavy, it doesn't look as though the books available in Kindle format (well, the 5 samples I downloaded, anyway) are really ready for use yet. Oddly, the errors weren't consistent - some Greek letters were fine, others were wrong. Some equations were fine, others weren't.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by MoSo

Re: the "other" kind of images.

I downloaded a couple of samples of technical books, and all of them had problems with formatting. If you are interested in reading something equation-heavy, it doesn't look as though the books available in Kindle format (well, the 5 samples I downloaded, anyway) are really ready for use yet. Oddly, the errors weren't consistent - some Greek letters were fine, others were wrong. Some equations were fine, others weren't.

The Kindle does not support all of the Greek letters. I suspect they were consistent. Do you have a case of inconsistency where it supported a letter in one book but not in another?

Dale

[MoSo]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

The Kindle does not support all of the Greek letters. I suspect they were consistent. Do you have a case of inconsistency where it supported a letter in one book but not in another?

Dale

It was inconsistent within books. I believe the difference was scanned image (in which the Greek text was fine) and regular text. It made it particularly confusing to read, as it was only wrong some of the time.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by MoSo

It was inconsistent within books. I believe the difference was scanned image (in which the Greek text was fine) and regular text. It made it particularly confusing to read, as it was only wrong some of the time.

Ah, yes I think it was figures vs. text. The Topaz format allows embedded fonts and would likely fix this problem.

Dale

[huari]

After reading about a post of missing text in ebooks, I'm replying to my own post to warn others to check their non-text ebooks within the 7 day return period.

I received a $5 credit for helping Amazon proofread the publisher's poor quality conversion of an ebook I bought that had a lot of tables, not found in the sample.

I have found a few more books with unreadable content in their samples:

The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness (Kindle Edition)
by Jeff Warren

The Back of the Napkin (Kindle Edition)
by Dan Roam

Like the poster of the missing text post, I had to check against a hard copy to 'read' the content.

The kind Kindle CS, gave me access to the Search Inside feature of the ebook I purchased so I was able to read the unreadable table, but this step highlights the problems with DRM that I previously didn't find an issue.
(I eventually screenshotted the searchinside page and saved it to my Kindle as an 6000 x800 jpg thanks to Igorsk's hack to uncover the hidden picture viewer so I could read the ebook content I paid for, yum)

Are customers now employed as proofreaders to check what content is missing, garbled or misformatted?

What if the ebook didn't have the Search Inside feature approved by the publisher and I was beyond the 7 day term?

Luckily that was not the case, but it seems a poor practice when the whole idea of the Kindle is to have a frictionless reading experience where the device 'gets out of the way'.

This has shaken my confidence with content on the Kindle that is technical or image rich in nature. I really appreciate the care and quality of work done by Harry, Patricia, Rwood, et al ie the mobileread ebook content facilitators who respect the work and so generously share. The publishers should hire or learn from them.

Since the kindle book reviews are not identified as kindle versions, it is difficult to weed out books that may have poor ratings due to formatting issues. Also it is not fair to the authors, to receive a poor rating for formatting when the content is a separate matter.

The current situation is really is a shame as the Kindle has no zoom, nor landscape and conversions of image/diagram/table heavy books have suspect quality control.

I hope that a firmware update and more user reporting will rectify this issue.

Please share your books that are unreadable!

[MoSo]

I've run across several books with what I know to be OCR errors (I volunteer for Distributed Proofreaders and see a lot of that). That's neither Amazon's nor Kindle's fault, it's sloppy editing/conversion by a publisher or third-party.

[jacksonunit]

I really wish there were a "Made for Kindle" type certification that addressed the poor graphics issue. I got one technical book and that will be my last one until Amazon addresses this. Most of the tables and illustrations were a complete waste.

I just finished Scott Adams "Sticke to Drawing..." on my kindle and was really annoyed by the graphics. I didn't buy this book for the graphics and didn't really expect to see any. What a dissapointment. I KNOW they could have been better if they had just cut up the panels and stacked them. As it was, I could only guess what the text said and the author referred to the comic text as if you could read it.

If I wen't to a movie with that kind of problem, I'd ask for a refund.

I know Mr. Adams has a few molecules of professional pride AND he actually responds to my emails so I am going to write him about writing amazon about it and I'm going to ask him to have them write me so I can write you about it too.

flerp,

jacksonunit

[huari]

Hi,

Any K2 owners care to share their experiences with the image quality in this book, Back of the Napkin?

If you don't have it, the free sample chapter has some sample images.

Despite the new zoom in the firmware update to my K1, I still can't see the images clearly and wondered if the 16 shades of gray in K2 helps any.

Thanks for your help,
tony

[malife]

This is one of the key reasons why I've decided to return my Kindle 2. I recently spent more than an hour in a local Borders playing with the Sony Reader and I have to say I was soooo disappointed with the Kindle 2. Granted that wireless is a nice feature in the Kindle, but the fact that PDFs are not natively supported and that in order to read a scientific paper (or textbook that I legally own in PDF format) I have to jump so many hoops has really made me decide to return it. And, if you've tried to use Amazon's conversion you probably already found out that it is useless for anything except pure-text documents.

Here is what I did, and what I suggest you do to verify if the type of documents you want to read render better in the Sony Reader. I put several PDFs of documents I typically read in a Sony memory stick ultra (or you could do it in an SD also) and went to Borders. Just plugged the SD card in the display unit and there they were all my PDFs ready to use. After turning the reading mode to landscape, most of the PDFs, specially the books were 100% readable.

Hope this helps

[huari]

Thank you, Malife for your reply. We too have had similar experiences.
It's true my wife's Sony Reader 1st gen. reads PDF better than my Kindle 1 particularly on landscape.

While I understand the formatting is due in large part from the publisher I still don't understand how Amazon can still sell these books that essentially have unreadable graphics (tables, charts, images).

Last year, I too had to render some PDFs for travel but instead of going the Kindle conversion route or converting the PDFs to jpegs, I ended up buying an iPod touch and saving myself a lot of headache. The nice thing is that Amazon has offered Kindle for the iPhone so I can read my text based kindle books on my iPod touch. Unfortunately despite the ubiquitous pinch and zoom UI, Kindle for iPhone doesn't support it and images can't be zoomed in for magnification. Plus not being e-ink, it burns up battery life and is more eye straining.

Oh well, here's to competition in the future and hopes for an e-ink reader that supports journal reading and other image intensive work without costing a ton.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by malife

This is one of the key reasons why I've decided to return my Kindle 2. I recently spent more than an hour in a local Borders playing with the Sony Reader and I have to say I was soooo disappointed with the Kindle 2. Granted that wireless is a nice feature in the Kindle, but the fact that PDFs are not natively supported and that in order to read a scientific paper (or textbook that I legally own in PDF format) I have to jump so many hoops has really made me decide to return it. And, if you've tried to use Amazon's conversion you probably already found out that it is useless for anything except pure-text documents.

But if reading PDFs was important to you why did you buy a Kindle in the first place? You know that it didn't support PDFs at the time that you bought it, didn't you?