E-book Complaints Thread

[Rob Lister]

This is your complaint thread. One complaint per post. Be brief but be specific. Free cheese to the best whine.

1. I pick up my nook, open the cover, and the screen saver is showing. I didn't pick it up to see the screen saver, I picked it up to read. I shouldn't have to push the button and slide the bar. It should know my intent.

[wyndslash]

I get annoyed by indie authors who publish "shorts" (sometimes less than 50 pages) and charge like $2.99 for them. It's their right, I get that, but still. It's also my right to get annoyed and call them greedy pigs (I don't, really. I just do it in my head and it stays there).

[Hellmark]

It bugs me that books from Random House, and a few other publishers, don't come with a cover, or a autogenerated cover.

As far as the complaint about the reader should know your intent, well, if they woke based on movement or something like that, they'd constantly have to poll the state of the sensors, and battery life would be much lower than if you simply pressed a button.

[xg4bx]

i hate when ebooks don't come with cover art or publishing info. i already feel like i'm not getting a real product for my money as it is, don't make it feel like i'm reading a 'stripped' paperback to boot.

[Joykins]

I hate it when the ebook is more poorly proofread/edited than the print book. This includes situations like random flipping of huge sections of the book into italics because of, apparently, a missed close tag.

[DiapDealer]

The onboard bios of my new cortical shunt is able to direct-inject printed-page comprehension at 4000x the rate of my stock organic neural pathways, but will eReader manufacturers get off their butts and build an interface?.... Noooooooo.

[JoHunt]

1. Ebooks by indies who flood certain book categories with every bit of tripe they've written since birth (or copying Wikipedia entries ad infinitum).

oops I just noticed only 1 complaint per post ...

[Avalona]

I hate when I'm reading a book and part of the formatting is borked, and it'll randomly have a page cut short (with plenty of space left), and then have the paragraph continue on the next page or sometimes even a page or two after that. Annoys me a ton.

[treadlightly]

Wacky margin widths and fonts set by the publisher. I want every ebook I open to have the same formatting in my reader - the one *I* choose.

[sunnysmiles]

I really dislike having to pay more for an ebook than it costs in Pbk or even the same cost in HBK.

[Pomtroll]

I hate there is no blurb to tell me what the book is about once I buy it. I have to turn on the wifi & go to the book description at the store. Sometimes I remember what it was about by the cover but not always...and besides half the time the cover art disappears once bought.

[JSWolf]

What I dislike is poor formatting...

Paragraph spaces, no indents, wide margins, small text instead of the default size for the main body text, wide indents (sometimes 5%), headers that start 3-10% from the top of the screen, botched simulated blockquotes, CSS code inside the XML files, line-height set to be too big and other stupid things publishers do to botch things.

[elemenoP]

That "dead zone" of books which are not public domain but are very old, so no one can seem to secure the rights and get a legal ebook out there! There are a lot of great books in this dead zone!

eP

[JSWolf]

Smashwords meatgrinder!

[JSWolf]

Amazon exclusive eBooks!