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Another entry for the Hall of Shame - from Penguin Books of all people.
The book is Interventions, by Noam Chomsky, as an ePub ebook. I'll review the errors found in the first three sections, though there are many faults are scattered through the rest of the book - on almost every 'page'.
It has margins of 1.5em, which works out to be 9mm on my Cybook Gen3 which has a screen 90mm wide. So 20% of the screen is white space; not available for text.
- 'written specifically for the Ne w Y o r k T imes', and this is repeated again in the Editor's note and in several other places.
- 'Scheer's f i ring could have been attributed .. by the likes of Fox's BillO' Reilly'
- 'after Hu go Chavez praised it'
- 'he would not be that unusualXB... because'
- 'relatively pri v i l e ged minority'
- 'w e ll b e f o r e 9/11 it was'
Almost every page has a similar error.
As in so many ebook footnotes are shown by a superscript number, which forces an ugly wider line space. Penguin does not seem to have noticed that ebooks are not print books, and need not be bound by the same conventions. There is no need to mark footnotes by superscripts - putting them in square brackets with a smaller font works just as well.
But the crowning glory is that there is an index, complete with page numbers - page numbers are meaningless in ebooks.
In the past I haven't known whether to be more concerned that publishers would shovel out rubbish like this without proof reading it, or that the publisher shoveled it out anyway without any concern for their reputation. Now I'm starting to wonder whether this is a deliberate ploy by Penguin to turn people off ebooks so that they will return to print books.
Regards, Alex
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