Quote:
Originally Posted by David Gaughran
Can I ask what brand of e-reader/device you are viewing on? That could help me hunt down what's causing this. The reason I ask is that the Smashwords system can put in gunky code that may only trigger the kinds of things you are seeing on one make of smartphone or e-reader - which might be why I haven't heard anything about this yet.
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I am a big fan of Smashwords, but this is on area they really need to work on. I take the time to hand code the HTML for all my e-book files, and it really pains me to have to take the regressive step of uploading a Word doc so Smashwords dumb system can mangle it like this.
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For anyone else affected by this issue, especially readers, I urge you to send an email to Smashwords to complain about the files their system spits out. I think they may listen to readers more than writers here.
Dave
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Thanks, Dave. I sent you an email in response to yours sending me the ePub, so I won't repeat it in detail.
Your original ePub version is very much better than the Smashwords version, and if Smashwords was close to that standard I'd have given you a four star review.
It's only four star because I still think that you have almost ignored the 40% of your readers (your figure) who prefer ePub, still think that mobi is a crippled proprietary format, and am still irritated by having to dumb down the markup to make it work in a mobi version.
I accept that it's mainly a Smashwords problem, and certainly accept that I should have complained to them. But I wonder if there is not some shared responsibility - you published through them.
I use a Sony PRS 650. I very much doubt that the first problem relates to a limitation of the Sony - so far as I know all or almost all devices which read ePub use ADE, except of course iBooks.
I think you've mentioned elsewhere that you ask others to check your ePub formatted ebooks. I do some conversion of ebooks myself, for a small UK publisher, and bought a Kindle and more recently an iPad so that I could be sure that the ebooks I produce are well formatted. I've sometimes had unpleasant surprises when the mobi version converted from the ePub version doesn't work on the mobi, and have had to redo parts of the XHTML.