[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Rellwood

@all,

Thank you for not trolling me for my comment. I appreciate it since it was made in good faith. @Cinisajoy, I am mostly seeing this on the KU books, but it also does occur on some of the more expensive books as well. I can't think of them off the top of my head, but it happens more often than not that I download a book open it to find that the spacing and the line height is atrocious. I agree with the consensus that an indented paragraph with no extra spacing be used.

Actually, the line-heights for Kindle formatting are required and specified (1.2), and not changeable. If you override them, you can expect a KQN (Kindle Quality Notice) and possibly withdrawal of one's book from being sold, until it's fixed. Period.

I didn't realize that this could be a problem attributed to by Amazon, I figured that they would accept whatever book and formatting is given an just send it like that.

They do, but they will issue KQNs for poorly-formatted books, and require that they be fixed.

<SNIP>Since KU pays the author by page,

Amazon does not pay authors by the page. They pay authors by the KENP (Kindle whatever Normalized Pages), which is based on CHARACTERS and WORD COUNT. Not "pages." What you are seeing is simply the extension of a generation that thinks that web-page formatting is how books are "supposed to be" formatted. I am constantly gobsmacked at how many would-be authors have apparently never read another book in their lives, as evidenced by their attempts at their own formatting.

it only made sense for me to believe that no one would want their books to look this way (line-height: %200) with the additional space between indented paragraphs. Personally, I liked justify for a time, but now I like going back to the left (ragged right side?) because it looks like a paper book (which like you all, I grew up reading).

Again, if Jane Author uploads her Word file for Amazon to process/convert, the line-height of 1.2ems/120% over the font size/height is set by Amazon, not the publisher or author. Even if the publisher pays a book formatter to make the book, commercially, it's 1.2ems.

Secondly, I've seen exceedingly few commercially published DT books, certainly not fiction, that are left-aligned/ragged-right. For adult reading, I guess I mean. Certainly, children's books could be ragged-right, but even the old classic Nancy Drews were justified. Hell, even the Maida books, from the 30's, were justified. I own several (4K or so) thousand DT books, in my library, and I seriously doubt I could find one that was not justified--and my non-fiction library is larger than my fiction. The paper books that you grew up reading are obviously quite different than those I've read over the decades.

Regarding the readers being able to process the books to a desired setting, this is not true of Kindles. They do not allow for formatting beyond a three set of line spacing and margin spacing.

And fonts, of course. The newer devices seem to be heading toward yet more customization.

I have since purchased a KOBO because it allows for more customization. However, I am stuck with Amazon since I have long since drank their Kool-Aide and now I am 10 years into them. Amazon does have a lot of great books, but I have also been going to the publishing websites and independent sellers (Smashwords) as well.
Thanks for your suggestions!

Well, if you are formatting-sensitive, you must suffer the pangs of the damned at Smashwords. While a handful of our clients do publish there--thereby uploading commercially-crafted eBooks--most of what I've seen there is unreadably bad, both in terms of content and formatting, in particular. Yes, Yes, before any of our other thread members comments, I am aware that a lot of MR-member authors do publish there, but many first-time authors who have invested precisely zero time and effort in learning their craft have, also. Too many of them read the infamous "Smashwords formatting Guide" and drink that KoolAid, too. The "Nuclear Method" has a lot to answer for.

Hitch