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Originally Posted by dharh
Yeah. In the meantime I'm fixing the badly edited e-books myself (had an e-book that had zero spacing between paragraphs, all bunched up, it was a horror to read) and I thank my lucky stars I didn't go crazy and sell all my paper trade books.
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For me, ebooks are an
additional format, not a replacement for paper, and I have some stuff in both formats. I still buy paper books, too.
I'm in the same position on ebooks that I'm in with music. I own about 1,500 old vinyl LPs. Replacing them with CDs would be a considerable expense, and many are obscure enough that I'm the only one I know who has even heard of them, and a CD probably doesn't
exist. There are tools out there to let me digitize them, then create a CD, but there's an enormous amount of work in adding all the metadata I'd want, not to mention the loss of the (often gorgeous) cover art. Bottom line, I still have a turntable, and don't plan to get rid of the vinyl.
So it is with ebooks. I have thousands of paper volumes that may not
have electronic editions, and I have better things to do with the money than buy ebook versions if they do exist. The paper books stay, too.
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Honestly if PDF were a better format or if e-pub had some forced formatting id say stick with one or the other for both print and e-books.
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PDF is a fine format for its intended purpose. If you need to have the electronic version look just like it will in print, on any device you view it on. PDF is your format. But most PDFs aren't created with the tagging to let them reflow on a screen size different than the one intended, and many are files where you wouldn't
want them to reflow, as it would destroy needed formatting. If you have a device that can display PDFs with a reasonable sized screen, they're fine. If not...
(My usual reader device is a Palm OS PDA. I have a
very good PDF viewer on it, but it's a small screen, and many PDFs require painful side scrolling to read. PDF is the
last format I get if I have a choice. If I used something like a tablet, my view might differ.)
ePub is a container. While we haven't seen much of it yet, what an ePub file may contain doesn't have to be text. Aside from images, it can contain audio and video. I'm not sure how you could force formatting, and I'm not sure it would be a good idea if you could.
Everyone is still wrapping their minds, tools, and editing skills around ebooks. I expect electronic editions to improve as the producers hone their skills. It's a little surprising when an ebook from a major publisher is the sort of horror you mention, but only a
little surprising. Major publishers still have a lot to learn, and in efforts to cut costs, things we think of as standard editing are increasingly not being done. (In your cited case, someone actually looking at the ebook on the target device before it was released for sale to catch such things seems to have been a "not done to save money" operation.)
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Dennis