More bad formatting

[Joques]

Against a Dark Background this time. Loads and loads of randomly-inserted hyphens in words. Like "sur-vived" or "ac-complished". Presumably an artifact of a bad OCR job? Also, every time there is a question mark after an italicized word, there is a space between the word and the question mark.

I just spent an hour correcting it all; an hour I'll never get back. Effin' lazy stupid publishers.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Joques

Against a Dark Background this time. Loads and loads of randomly-inserted hyphens in words. Like "sur-vived" or "ac-complished". Presumably an artifact of a bad OCR job?

More likely soft hyphens., which aren't supposed to show up, but indicate the point at which a word can be hyphenated. Some readers incorrectly display them.

[Ripplinger]

I had this happen on one of my first books I scanned when just learning how to do it when I imported to MS Word, it took forever to clean up those hyphens. I now use Atlantis instead of MS Word and never have that problem anymore. Bad (or no) proofreading after the OCR is finished is mostly to blame.

[Quexos]

Bad formatting in professionally published e-books (or books) is unforgivable as this is the job of publishers to make sure books are well formatted and all spelling properly written. But for those who remember e-books only 3 or 4 years ago, good formatting was a theoretical concept at best and while there has been some improvement over the years, there is still a lot that needs to be done. Now why something as basic as proper formatting takes years to come to maturity is anyone's best guess.

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by Joques

I just spent an hour correcting it all; an hour I'll never get back. Effin' lazy stupid publishers.

If you haven't already done so could I suggest that you contact the retailer and the original publisher? They are obviously not likely to pick up the problems themselves, and therefore have no motivation to correct it or make sure it doesn't happen again.

I was pleasantly surprised recently when I contacted Kobo and the publisher about an ebook with ridiculously small line space - they both thanked me, and Kobo offered a refund and the publisher sent me a corrected version.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by AlexBell

If you haven't already done so could I suggest that you contact the retailer and the original publisher? They are obviously not likely to pick up the problems themselves, and therefore have no motivation to correct it or make sure it doesn't happen again.

I was pleasantly surprised recently when I contacted Kobo and the publisher about an ebook with ridiculously small line space - they both thanked me, and Kobo offered a refund and the publisher sent me a corrected version.

I had a similar experience with a book from Amazon a while back. There were big gaps in the text where there was nothing but white space and I got a note of thanks for alerting them to the problem. Books with problems can slip through at times.

[DreamWriter]

Is anyone seeing auto-hyphenation in Kindle e-books lately, especially on the Fire/Kindle?

If so, I'd really appreciate knowing which specific reading device you use, the firmware version (if you know or can check), and the names of those e-book titles, so I can take a look at them.

Thanks!