MobileRead Forums - Rosetta E-books

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I saw where someone posted a bad review on Rosetta formatted ebooks. I haven't bought any so far, but I noticed on Amazon.com, there are two "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" versions offered for the kindle...The Rosetta version has 231 kb download,shows the book has 320 pages and is offered for more money than the Del Rey download, which shows 669 kb download, and 304 pages........can anyone tell me why the Rosetta version would almost 1/3 less formatting? And is staying away from Rosetta formatted books in general a good idea?

Thanks for the input........

Quote:

Originally Posted by desertgrandma (Post 215502)

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a series of book, There are different variations some have excerpts from the next book, One version has all the books in the series also. With the recent release of the movie there could be some movie pics inside or some Author info since he is no longer with us. Who knows.

JJ

I don't think I've ever noticed anything particularly funny about Rosetta formatting- I just finished one on Sunday without any problem. It looks like the .mobi format doesn't justify smoothly, which is annoying but sadly not even remotely uncommon.

I'd definitely suggest going the sample chapter route a few times to see if it's annoying enough it's not readable for you! They're definitely not the worst.

Usually I wouldn't worry too much about differing file sizes, even though that's an extreme one. Rosetta tends to add a little afterward which is probably changing the size a little bit. But the rest of it likely has to do with degree of compression, cover picture sizes, etc. Rosetta has been doing ebooks for a long time and are used to working with small devices, so they streamline.

If you take a word document and do word -> html, the html file is going to be huge compared to if you just coded in simple, clean html yourself. That could cause part of the problem as well.

Sheesh, I can't stop typing this morning. Maybe I need more coffee!

It doesn't sound like either version is formatted well. One of the reviews in the Del Rey publication says:

One is cheaper than the other but contains many many typos. There are two just in the downloadable sample so beware. The bad edition is published by Del Rey for $6.39.

But then a review on the Rosetta version is not complimentary at all, either:

This is a poor conversion to the Kindle. There are a large number of typos. Text formatting is almost totally lost. Only chapter breaks are apparent. Section breaks which quote the encyclopedias are marked with italic text, but otherwise all the sections run into one another with no visual indication that a new section begins. From reading this, I'd guess that the publisher simply scanned the text and performed no copy-edit or proofreading.