After reading about a post of missing text in ebooks, I'm replying to my own post to warn others to check their non-text ebooks within the 7 day return period.
I received a $5 credit for helping Amazon proofread the publisher's poor quality conversion of an ebook I bought that had a lot of tables, not found in the sample.
I have found a few more books with unreadable content in their samples:
The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness (Kindle Edition)
by Jeff Warren
The Back of the Napkin (Kindle Edition)
by Dan Roam
Like the poster of the missing text post, I had to check against a hard copy to 'read' the content.
The kind Kindle CS, gave me access to the Search Inside feature of the ebook I purchased so I was able to read the unreadable table, but this step highlights the problems with DRM that I previously didn't find an issue.
(I eventually screenshotted the searchinside page and saved it to my Kindle as an 6000 x800 jpg thanks to Igorsk's hack to uncover the hidden picture viewer so I could read the ebook content I paid for, yum)
Are customers now employed as proofreaders to check what content is missing, garbled or misformatted?
What if the ebook didn't have the Search Inside feature approved by the publisher and I was beyond the 7 day term?
Luckily that was not the case, but it seems a poor practice when the whole idea of the Kindle is to have a frictionless reading experience where the device 'gets out of the way'.
This has shaken my confidence with content on the Kindle that is technical or image rich in nature. I really appreciate the care and quality of work done by Harry, Patricia, Rwood, et al ie the mobileread ebook content facilitators who respect the work and so generously share. The publishers should hire or learn from them.
Since the kindle book reviews are not identified as kindle versions, it is difficult to weed out books that may have poor ratings due to formatting issues. Also it is not fair to the authors, to receive a poor rating for formatting when the content is a separate matter.
The current situation is really is a shame as the Kindle has no zoom, nor landscape and conversions of image/diagram/table heavy books have suspect quality control.
I hope that a firmware update and more user reporting will rectify this issue.
Please share your books that are unreadable!