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Old 12-15-2009, 03:55 PM   #35
Harmon
King of the Bongo Drums
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck View Post
They're counting on reader reviews to sort out the good books and encourage other readers to buy them; they don't need to invest in an editorial staff to pre-identify those books.

It's a horrifically inefficient process... but the wasted time & effort is all on the buyer's end.
I agree with your observation of the facts, but I'm not sure about the conclusion. It might be that buyers, as a group, do a better job of sorting the wheat from the chaff, and there are certainly a lot of people who seem to relish the opportunity to do so. Given that you can get a sample of every ebook on Amazon, and the existence of a tagging system, I could see that we buyers could agree on a tag system separating the poorly edited/formatted from the others.

I just bought The Polish Officer (Alan Furst) on the Sony Store. The formatting is screwed up, so that only italicized fonts can be zoomed. The regular fonts stay on S. I have to move to landscape mode to make it readable. I left a comment as a warning to other buyers, but wouldn't it be great if, say, Inkmesh could pick up tags like BF (Bad Format.)
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