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Originally Posted by eschwartz
... Rather than their depressing habit of just removing the indent and putting a slight margin. Which isn't the easiest to see, as well as being virtually invisible if it happens to fall out at the end of the page.
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Not sure what the "slight margin" means? I can say that we use block-style paragraphs regularly to indicate a scene-break, with more than one line of whitespace above it. Vis-a-vis incipits (the bolded letters, or smallcaps, etc.), there are a lot of good reasons not to do those, if one is not inclined toward the extra work. Most of the e-readers out there, other than iBooks, can't use the inherited "first-line" CSS, so all of the incipits are made by hand, with spans. Then you have people bitching because they changed the font size, and, OMG THE HUMANITY!, the bold continues onto the next line. This is a hanging offense, mind you. The same happens whether it's smallcaps, italics, what-have-you. Flush-left paras, given any type of decent whitespace above, really do work on more devices than any other type of scene-break, assuming your client/author doesn't want asterisks "like everybody else."
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I lose count of how many times I've had to page back and change the font size to check if there is perhaps a scene break that makes the book make more sense, because the publisher thinks an extra line is good enough for a scene break. And it is -- in physical books, where you can plot the layout and insert, um, asterisks, whenever that happens.
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With all due respect, the same thing happens in print. I know this because I have to deal with it all the time, with OCR output. There are thousands upon thousands of pages out there where a new scene starts at the top of a page, and nobody ever noticed or complained; they inferred from the content that a POV shift or a time-lapse or a location had changed.
And, with regard to formatting, typos, etc., in print versus ebook, and people seeing it now, versus not seeing it before, etc.:
everyone saw it before. The difference is, everyone wasn't spoiled rotten with instant gratification and some ridiculous idea that the publisher would instantly run back and FIX whatever was wrong. I think that this is the biggest disservice on the face of the planet done to publishers. In ye olden days, you'd gather up your list of typos, and if you DARED, send them into Random House or whomever, and then, if RH gave two s**ts, they'd put them in a folder somewhere, to think about--THINK about--maybe doing, IF they ever reprinted the book. More than likely not, but, just in case.
Nowadays, we have the patent absurdity of companies like Amazon sending out KQN's (Kindle Quality Notices) because some snot decides that they just can't LIVE with a typo, and sends it in to Amazon bitching about it. We received a KQN for one of the biggest authors IN THE WORLD, to fix TWO typos, one of which wasn't a typo (a Brit spelling, in fact), in a book that was more than
a quarter-million words. Much to my endless amusement, she called the Sr. Veep of Amazon directly, on his phone, and politely told them where to put it. And that was the end of that conversation. I regularly tell our clients to ignore Amazon's KQN's until a) they have at least 20 typos, or b) Amazon actually REMOVES the book from sale. Other than that, it's a ridiculous indulgence. The world has already become "entitled" enough. The idea that just because it's digital means it doesn't cost them money to fix is just...infuriating. Nobody would expect Random House to recall and reissue 10,000 print books. But they expect everyone to "hop to" if it's an ebook, as if everyone can just make a change in their Word file and have it insta-fix on the retailer.
And let me tell you, before you all jump on me about how sucky typos are, and how bad some of those Indie books are, etc.:
this is an unintended consequence of that mindset. I see this nonsense all the time on the KDP forums, with authors asking "how to notify their buyers" that they've uploaded changed manuscript #9 billion, because they think it is OKAY to do that. This idea, that the books are constantly fungible, constantly changeable, constantly update-able, has led to an entire world of authors who think it's OK to put a book up that is not finished, isn't ready, isn't suitable for primetime, because "it can be fixed later." So not only is this "fix-it" mindset a disservice to real publishers, but it's a disservice to the READERS, too, because you now have created a culture of authors who think that they can just fix whatever you find, while you freely crowdsource the editing and proofing that they should have had long before they pushed the "save and publish" button in the FIRST place.
Hitch