Quote:
Originally Posted by greenapple
I have bought a number of ebooks from both kindle and kobo stores over time. I've found that over 80% (at least) of ebooks aren't formatted the way paper books are usually formatted. On ebooks, the frequent issues are:
1) redundant blank lines between paragraphs,
2) very, very small indentations, or very, very wide indentations for first sentences of paragrahs,
3) totally no indentations for paragraphs, which makes the ebook read like an online document.
Does anyone find these poor ebook formatting decisions greatly affect his enjoyment of books the way I do? Why don't publishers agree on a standard?
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Greenapple:
And which of the million or so self-publishers, publishing books that look like that, do you think are going to get together and agree on how to do this consistently? The larger problem, as I see it (as the owner of a professional formatting company) is that most of the authors self-publishing today don't read the Style Guidelines put forth by all the retailers, Amazon and Kobo included, and don't understand, having grown up reading web documents, that unindented paragraphs are hard to read for long narrative passages. Most don't seem to care; I find many, many badly formatted books on Amazon. I simply pass them by, as I'm certainly not going to reformat a book I buy. I know a lot of MR'ers do that, but that is never going to happen with me.
Amazon, Kobo and B&N all have formatting guidelines, in which they request a certain consistency from the publishers, which are pretty thoroughly ignored. The problems you mention, e.g., indent size, are pretty common, as many people simply upload Word files that they've styled ad hoc, so you're seeing the default results. The extraneous blank lines? Self-pubs who hit "enter" twice at the end of every paragraph, and don't know any better, and don't remove those extraneous lines when they publish. And, I already spoke about the block-paragraph style. At my shop, we pretty soundly try to get our clients to not ever use block paragraphs unless there's a very real formatting purpose, due to exhibits, charts, etc.
And lastly, something that of course is near and dear to my own heart, many self-pubs don't want to pay for professional formatting, or worse, think that paying someone to clean up a Word file
is formatting. (They tend to get that impression from Smashwords, in my experience.) I see them all the time on the KDP forums, where a newbie will ask about professional formatting and the "old-time" authors will sternly warn them not to pay more than $25 or $50 for formatting. Are there firms out there that will work for that kind of money? Yes, but most of them simply take the Word file, clean it somewhat, and then feed it to the KDP and call that a "formatted book,"
if they even give the client a mobi at all. There's a huge difference between "conversion" and "formatting" and unfortunately, that distinction is pretty much obliterated in the rampant disinformation around the Net, particularly around self-publishing, which seems to positively teem with utterly incorrect information on a constant basis. </rant>
I know what you mean about consistency, but I'd recommend that you simply look at the LITB or the free samples and find out before you buy if the formatting is something you can live with, or not. That's what I do (and, of course, the content!).
I certainly would never--never--pay actual money for any book that looks like it was formatted by a deranged 4th-grader on crack. But then again, that's just me.
Hitch