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Originally Posted by barryem
I read several Gutenberg books every year and I've found the formatting to be mostly satisfactory. Not everything is precisely to my taste but it's just fine.
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We must be reading different books from Gutenberg. In my unhumble personal opinion, Gutenberg needs to update their automated conversion system.
Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
I'm an old guy and I read paperback books from the early days when they'd first become available in the 1950s. I began reading ebooks in the 1990s on an HP95lx. So that's about 40 years of reading paperbacks.
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I still have some of my paperbacks from the early 60s including most of the Ace doubles I bought back then. I beat you into reading ebooks by 15 years or so. There were some text file ebooks available shortly after I first built an S-100 bus computer (8 bit Z-80 CPU, 64K of memory though the upper 8K was lost to a ROM monitor) and quite a few more by the time I updated to floppy disks. Add in a modem and BBS systems in a couple of years and I was spending quite a bit of time on etext. I will admit that I started purchasing more hard covers than paperbacks as the 80's moved along.
Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
Paperbacks were always cheaper in the early days than hardbacks and they were less carefully formatted. Some were very nicely done. Many were not but I read them anyway and I rarely even noticed. There was no choice so why worry about it!
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For the most part, paperbacks that were published after the hardcover had similar formatting while straight to paperback tended to have sloppier formatting. As for being cheaper? I've seldom seen a paperback at any time that was more expensive than the hardcover edition. Part of the cost of getting the book earlier.
Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
Well all that's changed. Now we have the magic of ereaders and computers with software that can perfect (or ruin) the formatting of any book. And that makes possible people who, on finding the slightest imperfection declare a book to be garbage! 
Well folks, we're taught not to judge a book by it's cover and I don't think it's any wiser (or cooler) to judge a book by it's formatting. Those who do are not gurus. They're just fussy people. |
I have to disagree with you. For one, it's not minor imperfections that cause me to declare an ebook to have garbage formatting. I love me a well formatted ebook but I can live with minor formatting errors such using both indents and spacing between paragraphs. OTOH, switching between left, full & right justified with some centered pages thrown in just for fun, using multiple fonts that remind of the early days of the Macintosh where ransom note was a common description for what were supposed to professional documents, homonym abuse, etc. Quite a few of the sins of formatting that have been decried for years. Remember Liz Castro's Pigs, Gourds and Wikis blog?
As for being a guru? I tend to use that to describe people such as Hitch and Tex2002ans.
Fussy? Yes. When it's easily possible to avoid most common formatting errors with most of the available ebook creation packages, it becomes harder to forgive sheer sloppiness.
Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
I love to read and I judge a book by it's story and it's characters and the quality of it's writing. I'm happy if it's also formatted to my taste but that's not really all that important and more often than not I don't even notice.
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That you don't seem to notice bad formatting does not make it any less bad.
Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
By the way, the first decade of ebooks that I read were plain text files with no formatting at all beyond word wrap and paragraph breaks. They had a single font with no bold or italics and no right alignment. All that stuff came later. And they kept getting more and more popular. Imagine that! |
I remember reading quite a few books that did not use bold or italic. Quite a few of them also had painful to view rivers, full justification that reminded me of the some of the early computer justification where a line would look like "t h i s a p a r a g r a p h". OTOH, some of them had excellent justification, hyphenation that showed familiarity with the language, etc. depending on the printer. Much like today some of them did a much better job than others.