Quote:
Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
That's why I believe that eBook stores should do what Boomkat does with audio files: Allow you to sample a short range from anywhere in the file without giving you full access to the entire thing. That way, you can see how well the book reads later on, as you could flipping the pages in a physical store.
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This is a good idea. It's especially a bit hard to sample choose your own adventure stories and short story anthologies because of this. There are times that I've quit on an anthology because the first story didn't wow me, when a quick flip would have given me a good idea of the quality of everything else. Not sure how to replicate that in digital form though, you can few X number of pages at random? I've had pretty good rates of finding good indies to read just on the basis of the beginning sample. The stuff I didn't like about some of the books I picked up aren't ones that could spotted through sampling, it's more overall plot, character development, and world-building consistencies and stuff.
@Steven: That's a great standard to have. Not sure if published authors really have it any easier. I'm not any easier on typos or boring stories just because they're in a dead-tree legacy published book. Every page still takes up my time, and if my time is better spent reading something else, I would switch to that something else.