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you also miss things like well done illustrated title pages, frontispieces, maps, timelines and such.
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Not to mention occasional essential information. I read the ebook of Isaac's Storm and was halfway through chapter one before puzzlement stopped me. Who are these people I'm reading about? Turned out that the SRL had skipped a prologue that set the scene and introduced the most important characters.
Often I ask people what they're reading on that Kindle. Not only don't many of them know the name of the author, because they haven't seen the title page, but often enough they don't know the name of the BOOK, even though it's there at the top of every "page."
I like the notion that Amazon's doing it to avoid showing those awful covers, but I doubt that's the case. It's just another mindless algorithm. More and more, crap formatting that once would have ensured a book never sold a copy can now advance to an Amazon best-seller list. As authors have dumbed down, readers are following them. There's so much dreck on the Amazon store that dreck is becoming the norm (rather like our politics).
(And I'm not talking about the content but the presentation of it. It's not just who/whom, farther/further, or career/careen, but their/there! It's books formatted ragged right, double spaced, in effing COURIER BOLDFACE because the author rightly concluded that Courier was a bit on the light side for print. Just do a search on the Amazon store for
Independently published. That's the publisher of record for KDP Print books.)