Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
Theoretically setting the Text semantic should mark a file as the location to first open to, I don't know which ereaders will support it however. The Kindle definitely does (although as DiapDealer pointed out, KDP seeems to arbitrarily change that, sometimes, when uploading).
@ Hitch claims to have found a fix for that, but since her job is to process and polish peoples' ebooks, I don't blame her for refusing to share a trade secret.  <snippage> |
Yes. I suck that way. I just...I've simply learnt the hard way that my unselfishness for the first 3+ years of posting hither and yon was, in my eyes, taken advantage of. First by folks who suddenly decided that they'd become "eBook formatters," claiming to be The First Ones (*Babylon5 geeks will get that), -after having effectively learned the tricky stuff from me and others like me on forums, and secondly by others. It is one of those things that irks me; my "real" self wants to be chatty and share-y like everyone else, but my "biz" self reminds me that I got screwed over more than once by sharing. And in an ever-decreasing marketplace, I simply have to try to hang on. Above and beyond myself, I have employees that need the work. The same thing is now true of the fonts issue...I'm just not going to share about it. Believe me:
I don't like it. But I JUST this week saw something I'd said regurgitated over at the KDP as if it were (someone else's) original thought, and...
well. I've said what I need to say about it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
I liken it to someone asking a publisher/printer to arrange it so their physical book is weighted and balanced in such a way that it opens to a very specific page whenever a reader drops it spine-first on a table.
There's no real point to it, IMO. You can't make people read stuff they don't want to (or skip stuff they don't want to), so open the ebook and let the reader find where they want to start. They're readers... they have a lot of experience doing just this. They don't need any help. And if Amazon (since this is mostly their fault to begin with for trying to automatically find the "very best beginning point") wants to change things so books open at--or immediately following--the html ToC, then make sure nothing you deem " too important for the reader to miss out on" comes before that html ToC and have done.
I understand pros (like Hitch and others) are compelled by paying customers to "make this work," (and have to try and do so--bless their souls) but that doesn't stop me from believing that their paying customers are making mountains out of mole hills. Just rearrange the book so Amazon's diddling can't accidentally cause a reader to "start" too far into the thing and move on.
The SRL is giant, soul-sucking waste of time (on both sides of the equation). It's like spending enormous amounts of time, money, and resources on creating an automated system to detect which way you need to tilt your boot to dump the water out of it. |
Yes. In fairness to myself and other BookHo's like me, the biggest issue, in our eyes, is not forcing the reader to do X, nor even (really) satisfying the customer's desire that the book "open at my dedication," or what-have-you. The issue is,
self-defense. When Amazon's automated "helpfulness" started putting the SRL in various and sundry REALLY incorrect locations, those of us who are being paid to at least PRETEND to be professional (smile), had to find workarounds to rectify the problem.
Otherwise, quite honestly, I'd have stuck with immediately-after-the-cover, which gives EVERYBODY their own choices, pretty quickly. I think it's easier to open at the Title or Praise page, and click "Go to Beginning," if you want to skip to the first text page of the book, than it is to open at Ch. 1, and feel as though you have to page backwards, "just in case" there was a Preface or epigraph or something else that you may have missed.
Offered FWIW.
Hitch