Quote:
Originally Posted by bitemeok
I recently bought an Oxford UP history book, Albion's Seed from the Sony ebook store. The epub file I received was garbled, filled with typos, and in fact missing whole pages of text (I was able to compare my copy to the partial text available on Google books)--to the point of being unreadable.
I complained to Sony Ebook store almost 2 weeks ago and they haven't contacted me back and are still selling the book.
I also contacted the publisher and an email exchange with an editor there, who seemed better informed than the person I spoke to at Sony. She said she would pass the complaint onto the appropriate person but that it was Sony that was responsible for making the epub.
Does anyone know if it is the case that Sony converts its own books (I assume from PDFs)?
If this was a paper copy I could easily return it, but it doesn't look like Sony is going to do anything about it. Although they will lose 5-600 $ worth of sales a year as a result.
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Last I heard from my own publishers, each retailer does its own conversion, usually from an RTF file, at least if it's straight text like a novel. What you describe sounds like it could be a bad conversion from a PDF, which is always a dicey proposition. Or maybe just a garbled source file.
One big problem in the system as it now exists is that there's no mechanism for copies to be sent to the publisher (or author) for checking. Amazon, Sony, Fictionwise, none of them make copies available for proofing. How stupid is that? Smashwords does it automatically. The only other retailer that let me download my own books without buying them was Baen Webscription (when I made a point of asking).
So the answer to whose fault it is may be
both. And that might help to explain why these things don't get corrected faster.