Quote:
Originally Posted by AnemicOak
I my experience Smashwords books usually always have some kind of formatting issue, at least FOR ME. Maybe I'm picky, but I want a TOC, I want chapter and scene breaks, I don't want spaces between every paragraph, I want a cover (Mobi books don't have covers from what I've found), I want good metadata. So I usually end up having to do some messing around with a book to get it in it's most readable form (again, for me). This leads to me not buying much there anymore as I don't always want to spend a bunch of time reformatting stuff just so I can read it. Some of it's the "meatgrinder", but I think a lot of it is authors not following the formatting guide Smashwords provides. Basically a lot of the stuff I've bought comes of very amateur in presentation.
I love the concept of Smashwords, but would like to see the reality of it improved.
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Some of that is author choice, some the MeatGrinder. The MeatGrinder only allows bookmarks as TOC, no chapter or scene breaks.
My epub has a cover, I haven't looked at the other formats.
Spaces between paragraphs (block paragraphs) is an author choice. I did it to mine because I find that easier to read on my Sony. Personal preference. It would be nice if Smashwords could allow customers to set preferences, wouldn't it?
They're working on improvements - the limitation right now is having one .doc file that's 'ground' into every available format. I can understand why they do it that way, but it's far from a perfect system.