Quote:
Originally Posted by PeterT
You say well known; guess what... I have NEVER heard of that and I do read all posts in the Kobo forum here....
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You are right, I wrote about this on Kindle forum and nobody really paid attention so I was under impression that it is like telling that the sky is blue
To make it official I now tell how appalled I am with the current state of e-book format rendering. I understand that many traditional print finesses are unnecessary or impossible in e-readers due to freely selectable font size or screen area changes, or limitations due to memory and processor constraints of e-readers. However, there are many simple and critical features that are being ignored by current ebook moguls. Centered block text is one of them, another is "keep x lines together". I won't go into details for better indexing and dictionary support.
As a historic note, PostScript language, pdf predecessor, that enabled precise rendering of electronic data for printing was released in 1982 when most people had no idea what a computer looks like. So, what is the problem of current IT companies to develop a decent product?
As for publishers, current e-reader limitations is not an excuse for extremely sloppy formatting and proofreading I have encountered in some books. I give a leeway to self-published authors who don't know the difference between hyphen and en-dash when these books are appropriately priced. They will learn proper formatting with time. But paying more than $10 or $15 for e-book, in fact sometimes more than for a paperback version, only to discover that it lacks some important features or one third of the book is a useless index, or non-corrected OCR mistakes like 1 instead of I, is unacceptable.
It is even more shocking that such books are coming from respectable publishers like Penguin Publishing and others. Are they predicting their forthcoming demise in e-book age, so they no longer care about their reputation and rush to make a quick buck in their remaining time?