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Still slogging through Stephen King's Skeleton Crew. Again, not a slog because of the content, but because of the hideously sloppy formatting of the ebook. The worst offenses are:
- Random lack of italics. Some individual words that should be italicized aren't, some that shouldn't be are, and it's more common to see an italicized passage have random parts de-italicized than to see it rendered correctly.
- Hyphens and long dashes treated interchangeably. Frequently, an aside will start with a long dash and end with a hyphen, rather than being bracketed by a long dash on each side.
- No smallcaps. None, period, end of story. Everything that should be in smallcaps is in regular caps, and any "long spacing" that should occur between groups of smallcap text (ie. to separate sentences) has been replaced with a single space.
- No proofreading of the scan...and it's quite obvious that this is a conversion from a scanned source. For instance, in "The Raft," a character named LaVerne is variously called LaVerne, LaVeme, La Verne, and laVerne. There are also stray periods (apparently dust on the source) and a few random paragraph breaks/unifications.
To remove any doubt, this is not a pirated or gray-market ebook; this is the official Signet/Penguin release, purchased at Kobo. King's work deserves much better treatment than this.
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