Thanks to the
recent launch of the Sony Reader in Germany, e-book shoppers can now observe a surge in commercial German e-book titles. Two key players in the local market are
Thalia and
Libri that both offer e-books in the open-standard Epub format. And while getting ePub files onto your Reader may not be easy at first, on the whole, it seems to work quite well.
So everything is milk and honey? Not quite.
Ignored hardware limitations
We're a bit heavy-hearted to report of plenty of unhappy German-speaking users complaining about the sub-optimal quality of ePub titles they've purchased. One cannot help but believe that those book editors in charge were lacking important technical information regarding the current limitations of the Sony Reader. For instance, some simply ignored the size limitation of 300Kb per XML/HTML chunk. Without splitting large files into these smaller chunks, the converted e-book won't work properly on the Sony Reader. We've heard of at least one e-book that has been sold like this.
Flawed cover designs
E-book covers cause plenty of problems, too. Some titles are sold entirely coverless, while others may have a cover, but one that cannot be displayed (hint: the Sony Reader doesn't know Scalable Vector Graphics).
(EDIT: It does, actually. This makes the failure to display the cover even more baffling.) This is by no means an exception: Almost half of the reviewed e-books didn't have a cover. Notice that on the vendor's website, titles are prominently displayed with a cover, without any indication that a purchased ePub book would be missing this feature.
Missing Table of Contents
Quite a few ePub editors seem to ignore the importance of a well-done Table of Contents (TOC). Properly working, hierarchical structured TOCs are a rare thing indeed. Some of the (full-priced) e-book titles we checked didn't have a TOC at all.
Overlapping text
Adobe's DE viewer (which is used by Sony to render ePubs) has a fixed setting to display page numbers on the right margin. Most ePub editors seem to ignore this fact by forgetting to create sufficient margins for the page number. As a result, page numbers overlap with actual text content - not a pretty picture.
Basic OCR errors
Many of the titles our members checked had too many basic OCR errors, obviously due to a bad scanning process (proofreading, anyone?). Other ePub titles seem to be based on ostensibly bad PDF conversions (spaces within words, for example).
Meaningless CSS rules
A closer look at the underlying (CSS) styling of ePub files reveals the disappointing fact that some editor "experts" in charge did obviously not know what style rules were supported by the Sony Reader. Outdated "Font" tags were used and old-fashioned inline tag definitions instead of outline style sheets with classes.
Vendors blame publishers
Neither Thalia nor Libri were able to provide satisfying answers to the complaints by our disgruntled members. On the one hand, they admitted that quality may be suffering due to the lacking experience of the editors with ePub. On the other hand, they bluntly stated that they could not grant a right to return defective e-books. Oh, did we mention that in Germany, publishers have even gone to court to enforce the same price for e-books as for printed books?
A glimmer of light
Things aren't exactly rosy for the German e-book market, to say the least. But there is reason to hope. At least in the past few days, we could observe some e-book titles being sold at a marginally lower price than the paper equivalent. Nevertheless, if publishers are sincerely interested in the future and evolution of a functioning e-book market, they must get their act together now and focus on improving the quality of their offerings. It goes without saying that they must quickly fix the existing faulty books and offer them free of charge to affected customers.