Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
The bloody eBook formatting is abysmal. I mean, horrible. Much of the book takes place in chatrooms, ICQs and the like. They could have taken myriad different paths to conveying this locales, text etc to the reader, but noooooooooooooo.
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My experience is that almost 1/2 of big publisher titles need the ebook formatting edited. I don't buy much small publisher & indy stuff, but not seen as much problems.
Really a decent formatted docx -> Calibre -> epub is better than the garbage being churned out using InDesign (really designed for paper publishing) and Vellum and a couple of others.
Then epub -> Amazon after it passes checks and maybe tweaks on image CSS width / height.
It's idiotic. One big mistake is doing paper version first and duplicating it. They need to do epub first and then "fancy up" a copy of source WP file for PDF export (drop caps, small caps, half spaces, more fonts taht work on paper and poor on eink, footnotes differently, white space, tables, front matter, rear matter.
There are two really stupid approaches to ebook format/conversion:
1: Copying a complex over pretty paper version.
2: Having a web page designer do it and pretend it's like a web page.