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Bad formatting is irritating. It's especially prevalent in topaz books which are, I understand, scanned from physical copies. I've stopped buying topaz books completely even though there are a number I really wanted as ebooks. Now, I download a preview of every book I intend to purchase just to make sure it's not in topaz.
Mobipocket (azw) books tend to be better but frequently suffer from too much white space between paragraphs. This is quite irritating, especially in books that have extensive dialogues. If the book is DRM-free this can be readily fixed in calibre by replacing multiple blank lines with just a single one. Alas, most Amazon books are DRMed. Perhaps the recently available DRM filter for books imported to calibre might be helpful.
I've also noted that some publishers don't even bother to spell check text before converting it to an ebook. I'd love to be able to correct the text as I read but currently this is not possible.
What can be done? Leaning on Amazon won't do much in the short run though the message will eventually get through to the publisher. The excess white space problem should be controllable with better Kindle software that would give the user more control over display formats. A limited Kindle editing capability would help those few of us who are annoyed by poor spelling and poor formatting. Refusing to buy topaz-formatted books and pressing Amazon for a better format such as epub will help readers as well as Amazon and the publishers in the long run. And really bad formatting should be brought to the attention of the author via emails to the author's Web site, He or she would be in the best position to pressure a publisher for a better version. Finally, Amazon should augment their computer record system to automatically email purchasers of a given book whenever a corrected version can be re-downloaded.
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