Are some publishers doing a better job than others?

[taming]

I've noticed that Harper Collins ePUB books seem to be waaaay less annoying than books from some of the other main stream publishing houses. It may just be for newer titles. They are also non-Agency priced, so I can use my kobo discount codes.

[vaughnmr]

Harper-Collins is in the Agency Cartel.

For me, Penguin seems to be the worst as far as pricing and ebook quality.

[bhartman36]

I know Random House has a lot of imprints, and some imprints might be better than others, but RH has annoyed me since I've gotten into my Kindle reading. For one thing, they have a policy of turning off text-to-speech in their e-books (and it wouldn't surprise me at all if they take the same attitude towards lending).

I don't have a real opinion on quality, though.

[ATDrake]

I've noticed that smaller houses like Kensington seem to do a beautiful job with their books (admittedly, I get the free ones so maybe the quality drops with the non-promo paid stuff) better than the majors, usually.

Few if any noticeable typo/scannos, formatting neatly done (curly quotes, no-indent on first paragraph in a section), proper table of contents and flickable chapter marks in the Kindle editions.

And while Random House may turn off TTS, they've been pretty good about putting some of their backlist books up and doing a better-than-decent conversion job and pricing them reasonably, at least for the ones I've tried.

They recently made an effort to put up the early Elizabeth Macpherson mysteries by Sharyn McCrumb (originally published in paperback late 80s-early 90s) from the very 1st onward (released Nov 2010) and have been pricing them around $5-6 after standard discounts. And the two Barbara Hambly Benjamin January mysteries I splurged on in e-book and also have the original hardcover editions for (published early 2000s) do a very nice job "replicating" the print editions, using the fancy chapter heading graphics and including all the maps and genealogy tables and such (no covers, though).

While the layout seems a little inconsistent (first para no-indent on some books, but not others; looks like someone messed up the style sheets for those titles), the actual texts were in pretty good shape, for the ones I've bought, at least.

[DreamWriter]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Few if any noticeable typo/scannos, formatting neatly done (curly quotes, no-indent on first paragraph in a section), proper table of contents and flickable chapter marks in the Kindle editions.

I don't have any observations as to which publishers are doing a better job than others, but the features mentioned in ATDrake's post are certainly appreciated by me (a Kindle user)!

What I don't understand is that it really doesn't take much extra effort to create a well-formatted, attractive ebook, so why aren't more publishers paying attention to quality and enabling special features supported by the devices?

[taming]

Originally Posted by vaughnmr

For me, Penguin seems to be the worst as far as pricing and ebook quality.

Not in Canada.

[HarryT]

I've bought a number of "Penguin Classics" eBooks and they've been very good.

[Anthem]

Originally Posted by taming

I've noticed that Harper Collins ePUB books seem to be waaaay less annoying than books from some of the other main stream publishing houses.

One of my most recent book purchases was a HarperCollins ebook. Doubt: A History (2003, but the ePub is June, 2010). The formatting is a little funny but other than that everything is fine. With HarperCollins I have noticed that the accuracy of the text is usually very high while the formatting can suffer a modicum (although in this case a bit beyond that).

Penguin/Putnam/Viking/etc. Group have been pretty raunchy so far but they seem to be doing a little better in recent years.

[Kali Yuga]

Some publishers will do a better job than others, some ebooks will turn out better than others, for a little while longer. Pretty typical of any transitional period IMO.

Eventually they'll get the hang of it, and hopefully they'll realize they need to be as precise as they are with paper books.

[colinsky]

Strangely enough Penguin UK and Penguin US seem to use distinct base template for their epub books, at least the one's I've seen. I've even had a chance to view different samples of the same book in US and UK forms.

[Anthem]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

Eventually they'll get the hang of it, and hopefully they'll realize they need to be as precise as they are with paper books.

I agree with you. Things will improve. I look forward to the precision matching the authority of a printed version. Sometimes I read a sentence and think, "Is this what it really says? Because, if you just change this letter... etc."

And some books (not a large publisher) like In The Beginning by Isaac Asimov which was digitized by e-reads is absolutely dreadful and the print version should be preferred when wishing to quote from it or use it as a source of any sort of information (even though I only have the ebook edition). It appears they digitized the volume, slapped an ePub cover on it and put it out there. There are simple problems on every page resulting from innacurate OCR scans.

[Steven Lake]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

I've noticed that smaller houses like Kensington seem to do a beautiful job with their books

That's not true with all small houses, but I would say that it does hold true for the vast majority. I know it did, and still does with my publisher.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by Anthem

And some books (not a large publisher) like In The Beginning by Isaac Asimov which was digitized by e-reads is absolutely dreadful and the print version should be preferred when wishing to quote from it or use it as a source of any sort of information (even though I only have the ebook edition).

Ah, e-Reads, where scene breaks go to die.

Yeah, I've picked up a bunch of books from them, and while I'm grateful that they're steadily making seriously out-of-print backlist stuff I'm actually interested in available DRM-free and MultiFormat, their quality control is simply not up to their enthusiasm.

To be fair, most of the mistakes that I noticed in their books that I've read were very obvious and easily fixable (and relatively infrequent) scannos, and the all-too-common scene-break eating thing which is usually fairly obvious where there was meant to be a break and I can check against a paper copy if the used bookshop's got any.

Easier to live with than the surprisingly annoying dropped punctuation, superfluous hyphens, and pseudo-l33t5p34|< that arises from various OCR errors sprinkled throughout the current major-publisher freebie I'm reading.

Still, one of these days I'm going to take the time to track down and fix the errors in my eReads editions and send the corrections to them in the hopes that they do something about it for the benefit of their other customers. Because they don't price their books cheaply unless you catch them during a deep discount Fictionwise coupon sale.

I think the general rule for smaller houses is all-or-nothing. Either they have a process in place to do a good job overall, like Kensington and Harlequin (I've only seen their freebies, but the ones I looked at are very nicely put together), or they do a lazy-seeming job across the board (I like Baen, but their stuff seems to be auto-generated using Calibre and the typographical/layout niceties can be a bit lacking).

But whatever you get, there's some form of consistency.

Big houses, of course, seem to farm out to various producers, so there's more of a reader roulette thing going on.