Quote:
Originally Posted by piperclassique
The author's words are what matters to me, and as long as there are no blatant errors my eye will slide over minor imperfections. A decent readable font, sensible line spacing and left aligned and I'm a happy bunny. Sorry for not being a perfectionist
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I'm not a perfectionist either. I read ~200 fiction titles a year, according to
last year's reading challenge stats and I simply don't have the time or inclination to fix everything which goes wrong in an e-book. Although I do highlight the errors as I run across them, jut in case.
But I do like to see a certain minimum standard of indented paragraphs and chapters start on new pages and hopefully there's a working table of contents/flickable chapter marks which I know from personal experience that I'll often have to apply myself if they're not already pre-existing.
And my preference for ePub is based in the fact that from time to time I do end up buying e-books which turn out to have rather spectacular, reading-impeding Stuff That Has Gone Wrong, such as Barbara Hambly's
The Silicon Mage which like all the other books in that series not only has frequent OCR "th" -> "m" errors, but also chops off the last paragraph of each scene and appends it to the first paragraph of the next scene. Or David Gerrold's
The Man Who Folded Himself, which is afflicted by random wordssmushedtogether on every single page of the Kindle version of the book, which I bought on sale last year. Or Nancy Goldstone's non-fiction biography
The Lady Queen which has the exact opposite problem of hav ing words rand omly spl it like this ag ain on every sin gle page.
And these are all things I'll very likely have to fix myself, because when I contacted Amazon CS to inform them of a similar error in Hambly's
Those Who Hunt the Night which I'd also bought on sale and supplied a lengthy list of exactly what and where had gone wrong for them to pass onto the publisher, all that really happened is that the book was yanked from the store for some time* and when it reappeared later, it still doesn't seem to have been fixed.
I haven't received any of the usual notifications from Amazon CS that a corrected copy might be available and my Manage Your Kindle page doesn't have an "update your version" option for this book (while some of the other titles I don't care about do).
And it's not just my Amazon-purchased books. Several of the Paul Cook sf backlist I bought direct from Phoenix Pick have for some bizarre reason the base font set to a tiny squinty size. A Smashwords mystery I have from Lillian Stewart Carl has random alternating normal and fixed-width typewriter-looking text throughout the entire book.
So yeah, my preference for ePub is also predicated in part directly upon the certain knowledge that any serious messes that are inside a book, I'll have to spend my own time cleaning up if I want a reasonably readable copy that doesn't make either my eyes or my brain hurt.
And I've found that I spend somewhat less time and effort fixing ePubs (that squinty font size can be taken care of with a minor adjustment to an ePub's css file, while for Mobi I'd have to run a search and replace regexp on practically every paragraph) compared to doing it starting from a Mobi base.
* And right in the middle of my talking up the 99 cent promo price to encourage people to go check Hambly's works out.
