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Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
It's one thing to criticize authors going through Smashwords... but books by professional authors, issued by major publishers, can be even worse. Especially when they are scanned in and OCR'd.
Every book I've recently bought from Barns & Noble come under the scan-and-OCR area, and without fail, they have had misspellings and formatting errors on at least every other page, far too numerous to catalog. I mean, we're talking about hundreds of spelling/formatting errors in one book. It's atrocious. My sloppiest uploaded text wouldn't contain so many errors. And these are in books that you'll pay $8-$10 for.
Simply put, there ought to be a law protecting consumers from such pathetic formatting, especially at the prices you pay for a book... if it was on paper, you wouldn't have to tolerate such bad formatting, you could show it to any store manager and they wouldn't think twice about refunding your money. But with ebooks, it's somehow okay.
One more thing that will drive consumers to pass on major publishers' works over indie authors who clearly put more work and care into their books.
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And don't forget the sloppy standardized (mostly) formatting that we get with most ePub these days. Even if there are no errors in the text, the formatting is line spaces that are sometimes larger then one line, no indents or overly large indents, section breaks that are overly large, small used for the base font so when the text should be smaller then normal, we get xtra-small, and when a drop cap is used, the spacing for the first line is awful. All of this leads to a poor read as we pay attention to the formatting more then the book. We even get something like * * * that was in the paper edition to mark a section break at the end of a page. So the publisher just not know how to make an eBook look good?