Spoiled Kindle experience: too much sloppy content

[Grace Elliot]

Dare I stick my neck out and say that some of the small digital publishers have jumped on a bandwagon and are chucking books out quick and cheap. It is these small publishers who are just in it for the money who are responsible for a lot of poor quality reads. My opinion is that a lot of Indie published books (OK, of course there are exceptions) are generally well edited and professionally presented IMHO.

[woe]

Originally Posted by Geralt

Been using Kindle Keyboard for over a year, and honestly I have no idea what OP is talking about.

Then I daresay you're buying the wrong ebooks. Having purchased a few hundred titles over the last couple of years from five different stores I can make a few observations. More recent and more popular titles tend to be relatively clean. I've read quite a few that had no major issues at all, and many more with only the very occasional very minor error. Older titles are worse, and pretty much invariably the errors are obviously the result of poor-quality OCR scans. By far the worst, in my experience, are titles from Penguin Classics. A few have been so thick with errors as to be virtually unreadable.

[Geralt]

Originally Posted by woe

Then I daresay you're buying the wrong ebooks.

I think I might be buying the right kind, since I have no problems you speak of.

I should mention, I buy only on amazon.

[GeoffR]

It would cost publishers virtually nothing to fix the obvious spelling errors in backlist ebooks.

All they need to do is offer a few fans of the author a copy of the book to read a week or two in advance of it being released for general sale. I would happily agree to read such a book within a week and report any errors I found. I would even pay for the book, perhaps on the condition that I could have a refund and a free copy of the corrected book if I found any errors.

For backlist books there is no issue with the plot being leaked or anything. At most it would cost a few free copies of the book.

[woe]

Originally Posted by Geralt

I should mention, I buy only on amazon.

Kindle titles are just as susceptible to typos as those from anywhere else, as they all come from the same ultimate source - the publisher. I have noticed no real difference in error rates between Kindle and other stores/formats.

To the extent they're converted to the Kindle format from EPUB or some other format, Kindle titles might be somewhat more susceptible to formatting errors. It can be difficult to guarantee that an automated format converter will always generate perfectly correct output.

It may be that you just don't notice an occasional isolated typo. Some people are cursed with the copy editing gene, which causes them to get hung up on niggling little mistakes that most people remain blissfully unaware of.

[Geralt]

I know what you are saying. Only thing I wanted to say is I personally had no such experiences.
Sure, maybe I wouldn't notice a typo, but I would sure as hell notice paragraph breaks in the middle of a sentence or sloppy layout. Hasn't happened so far!
Guess I'm lucky.

[woe]

Formatting errors are pretty rare, in my experience. Typos (i.e. OCR scanning errors) are pretty common. (Perennial favourites: exclamation points turning into capital Is, and "in" turning into "hi".) And occasionally I'll see a page number in the middle of the text.

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

It would cost publishers virtually nothing to fix the obvious spelling errors in backlist ebooks.

All they need to do is offer a few fans of the author a copy of the book to read a week or two in advance of it being released for general sale. I would happily agree to read such a book within a week and report any errors I found. I would even pay for the book, perhaps on the condition that I could have a refund and a free copy of the corrected book if I found any errors.

For backlist books there is no issue with the plot being leaked or anything. At most it would cost a few free copies of the book.

Oh, is that all? Even if such a scheme were feasible, where's the staff time to coordinate the logistics and then verify and follow up on any changes? That's not free.

[Namekuseijin]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

One reason: Because they don't *want* ebooks to succeed. They don't want ebook readers to think of ebooks as being just as good as paper books, especially hardcovers. They want readers to associate ebooks with lower quality, sloppy writing, and annoying errors. They believe that readers will decide to buy hardcovers instead of ebooks--instead of deciding that there's no notable difference in quality between mainstream publisher ebooks and indie/self-pub $1.99 ebooks.

I don't no.

On the one hand, it is easy money after all, if you convince most consumers to pay for ebooks the same price you used to pay for hardcovers and then set out to sell hardcovers for a premium pricepoint.

On the other hand, well, I forgot my line of reasoning...

the harsh reality? both pbooks and ebooks are becoming more and more a niche...

[kevinp]

Spell Check was never meant to replace proofreading. Most idiots these days think if they run spell-checker, that's good enough. Spell-checker doesn't do a great job with grammar. You can always tell when they only run spell-checker.

[Anabana]

Something I've noticed in cataloging is the use of computers to assign genre. Apparently, certain words or phrases are supposed to generate the correct genre.
The most humorous one I've seen lately was Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. The genre; History -- Netherlands.
The publisher was Random House, but I have no idea whether the genre was set by publisher or database service....

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by elemenoP

About formatting issues: I recently switched from a Sony reader to a Kindle, and I'm MUCH MUCH happier with the formatting. It seems that epub gives a lot more control over formatting... which is both a blessing and a curse and after several years I have decided it's more a curse than a blessing. I never knew what a book was going to look like on my Sony reader until after I loaded it. Even after doing my own custom conversions in Calibre, for which I wrote my own CSS, loaded my own fonts, etc, sometimes the book didn't look right. Of the books I have read on the Kindle over the last few months, they all look THE SAME, both sideloaded books and books purchased from Amazon. That's not to say that the formatting is exactly as I would want it, but it's good enough and I no longer want to spend any time formatting ebooks. I let Amazon do it for me and I'm satisfied.

As for typos, I mostly read new releases and I sometimes notice typos but not too many. When I read a public domain book, I would certainly look for a high-quality source such as the MR library or B&N's classics series. I would not get them from Amazon or Gutenberg.

eP

The mobi format at least is much simpler than epub. When I am faced with a really odd formatting problem I will often find that converting to mobi and back again fixes it without any loss of quality IMO. Don't know about AZW3 etc.

I am a lot like you I think in that I don't care if the caps are dropped or if there are 16 different font sizes etc. I just want it to be comfortable to read although I do appreciate proper section breaks and the dialogue being obvious that it is dialog.

Helen

[GreenMonkey]

The badly formatted books tend to be older catalog titles. My wife never sees this problem either - but she tends to a lot more bestsellers and popular fiction than I do.

Example: check the reviews for Anne McCaffery's Dragonriders of Pern anthology. It is really terrible. Apparently the print book version was also sourced from bad scans/OCRs also though because there's a ton of errors in that also. So not just an ebook problem.

[Ti-Ron]

From my experience, ebooks don't have the same traitment as a paper book. Normaly, editor ships the book to be converted to outsourced production. Many times, there's no proof reading on the e version...

[taosaur]

Originally Posted by Tim_A

If it's an old back-catalogue book, the ebook version is probably built from an OCRd scan of the print book.

This. What a lot of people with the impression that "ebooks are full of errors" fail to recognize is a selection bias driving them toward hastily scanned OCR content and/or "pulp" quality new works which have always been just as riddled with errors in their print editions. Non-fiction, particularly self-help, has also always been plagued by rushed-to-market snake oil, which is going to have print errors in addition to its general worthlessness.

Everyone is also cutting DTBs too much slack. I've found at least minor errors in many, possibly most big-name doorstop novels I've read, and old pulp sci-fi is worse by far.

Any ebook released alongside a new print edition is likely to be identical, because they will be produced from the same source. Whether there's more pulp and snake oil being produced, and whether consumers are more likely to find and purchase pulp ebooks than pulp p-books... well, it's very likely, but has no bearing on the quality of ebooks in general.