More and more sloppy formatting

[susan_cassidy]

I would hope they would be able to easily translate newer books into ebook form. But, if they are not very computer-literate, they may not realize that they need a programmer to write some translation software to help convert their typesetting files to ebook format. I don't think it would be all that hard to do a much better job than they seem to do, however they are currently doing it.

[whitearrow]

I just wrote a blog post about the ongoing formatting/quality issues here: http://distractions.dreamwidth.org/987.html

[KlondikeGeoff]

Originally Posted by KlondikeGeoff

and the current book has, on almost every page, at least one instance of two words run together without a space.

Above from my OP. Readers may be interested in what has happened since. The current book, "Perfect Poison" is not that great anyway, but that is the one with two words connected without a space between them. On almost every page in the book there are two to three of these things, plus goofy punctuation, proper nouns not capitalized, etc. It has become so annoying that by 1/3 of the way through, I emailed Amazon about this, suggesting they send it back to the publisher for correction.

I then got an email reply offering sympathy (but no tea), and providing a link that took me to an email page. I entered my name, email, order number and a complete description of the problem.

I then hit "submit" and got a message that they were sorry, but were having technical difficulties and could not receive this email. I tried it three times with the same result (new policy to avoid having to read criticism?).

So, I gave up there and sent an email to feedback describing the problem, and reiterating the formatting problems. I then got a reply suggesting it would be better to telephone CS.

Cheech. Anyway, this morning I did that and asked for a refund, and they immediately agreed to do that. I insisted that they forward the info about the book to the powers-that-be, and he promised to do this, but who knows?

This is only the second time I have felt it necessary to call about a problem severe enough to prevent me from finishing the book, and both times they did give me a refund without any complaint, so that is pretty good I guess.

Pity have to go through all this trouble, though.

[NavyDad6]

Be careful not to exceed Amazon's mysterious "excessive returns" tripwire and have your account banned.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Mike L

But, surely, OCR and proofreading can't be an issue for more recent titles. For such books, the publisher must surely have a way of extracting the text for the ebook from their traditional composition systems. In other words, the text is already held electronically (complete with formatting tags), so converting it to an ebook should be a mechanical process.

You'd think so, wouldn't you?

Nope; doesn't work that way. Many publishers don't keep an e-copy after the contracted print run; if they do, it's the ready-for-print PDF that may not convert to another format easily.

Whatever process is used to create a second edition or new pbook print run, it's not "start with the original Word/HTML document & adjust formating from there."