|
For what it's worth, I routinely reformat ebooks whose format I don't like. I started doing this out of necessity when I was getting PD ebooks from Project Gutenberg and Gutenberg Australia, and have carried it over elsewhere where necessary. Mostly it's preferences: I like no spaces between paras, single line height, and indents for paragraphs.
And I'm right with you there when it comes to aggravations in otherwise acceptable texts. At one stage I read a whole bunch of ebooks by E Phillips Oppenheim (PD here in Australia) and he had the habit of using thousands (well, it felt like thousands) of substitutes for the word "said", often when dialogue tags were entirely unncessary. I'd get a few chapters in and then the endless variations would finally hit me. And tend to throw me out of the book.
One of his favourite "said" substitutes was "confided", and my favourite example of misuse was in a courtroom scene with a woman witness under cross-examination. I couldn't see how she could "confide" in anyone in those circumstances. In fact no dialogue tag was needed at all.
Once I started to re-edit an Oppenheim novel to replace these words with "said" or delete superfluous dialogue tags altogether, out of curiosity to see how it would read, and gave up very quickly, before about 5 pages in. There were just too many of them, half a dozen every page.
|