I am on a major reading binge, and am having bit of a pet peeve with badly proof-read ebooks. I don't even mean the occasional formatting glitch (I have had a few titles with wonky characters where accent marks or em-dashes might be) but I am talking about shoddy copy-editing. I am reading one right now which has characters named Jimmy, Jeannie and Jordy. I am about halfway through, and at least once, they have said 'Jeannie' when they clearly mean 'Jimmy' from the context. Several times, Jimmy has been called 'Jimmie.' And sometimes with quotation marks, there will be words after the close quote that should have been within the quote e.g.
'It's okay' Dad, she said.
I don't want to write to Fictionwise again. They already gave me an unasked for refund with the book which had the accent problems (I informed them of the problem, said it was not a huge issue and I still read the book but that if they should correct it, I would like to be notified so I could re-download, and they just refunded me the book). Anyway, I don't want to be a problem customer and exceed some hidden refund quota or something
But this bothers me that the author or publisher or whomever was so careless and did such a bad job with this. This is a 'major' ebook author with over 60 books at Fictionwise, and either he should know better or he should perhaps focus more on quality than on quantity at this point. It's books like this which make people think ebooks are inferior reading which would not be accepted by a mainstream publisher. And there are customers like me who have paid legitimate money for these products, so an ebook we buy should have some standard of quality that it has been checked like a 'real' book, shouldn't it? If I wanted to read a book riddled with careless errors, I could read off the Darknet, but this is a book I PAID for.