Next chapter in the saga of poor ebook formatting

[Joques]

Today's entry: my copy of "Best Served Cold", by Joe Abercrombie.

Inconsistent use of italics in the flashback chapters: Sometimes italic, sometimes not, sometimes it shifted from italic to non-italic midway through a paragraph

Inconsistent gaps underneath chapter headings. Some extra large, others smaller. Went into the html and found some chapters had extra line breaks under the chapter headings, while others did not. No rhyme or reason to the discrepancy.

Lastly, consistently much too large gaps between scene breaks. This one might have been an artifact of my wholesale Calibre conversions, though I've never had this happen before. Usually it is the other way around - that the scene break gaps are removed.

Once again I am thankful that removing DRM is so trivial - otherwise I couldn't have corrected the publisher's sloppy mistakes.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Joques

Lastly, consistently much too large gaps between scene breaks. This one might have been an artifact of my wholesale Calibre conversions, though I've never had this happen before. Usually it is the other way around - that the scene break gaps are removed.

Once again I am thankful that removing DRM is so trivial - otherwise I couldn't have corrected the publisher's sloppy mistakes.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but your wording makes it sound as if the book may have gone through a calibre conversion. Is that right? I'm not saying there might not be publisher mistakes; I'm just saying it's only fair to point them out in the untouched retail copy.

calibre's very good at what it does but there's no guarantee of a perfect one-to-one retention of the original layout when converting.

Where did your retail copy come from?

[tompe]

The original kindle version have annoying big gaps between paragraphs. It is especially annoying in dialogue.

[Joques]

Why wonder? I just checked my pristine copy, and the italics problems are definitely present there too. The first flashback chapter is all italic. The second one is all non-italic. The third one starts out italic, and shifts to non-italic halfway through the first paragraph.

The scene breaks are simply inserted line breaks like this: <div> <br/></div> instead of having the padding properly defined in the corresponding css class. So that's why they were too big.

The inconsistent gaps under chapter headings are indeed not present in the pristine file, so I will give you that one. That seems to be a weird artifact of Calibre, but it is strange that I haven't seen it in any other books.

[Joques]

Also, yes like tompe says, the original pristine file does have gaps between paragraphs - which personally I like, but I realize many don't.

[DiapDealer]

You still haven't said whether it was originally from Amazon or one of the other epub retailers.

Like I said ... I have no problems believing there are formatting errors from the publisher. I just see no point in looking at a calibre conversion to find them, or to point them out. calibre gets source material it's never seen before thrown at it every day. So it's not all that odd to see something unexpected manifest--or to see different formatting introduced when converting.

Clearly the original had a few issues to begin with in this case. But it just seemed odd to me to be using a calibre conversion for checking/condemning a publisher's work; that's all.

I purchased and read Best Served Cold back when a well-formatted retail mobi was the exeception rather than the norm; so I don't remember if the formatting tripped me up or not. I do know that I've seen a steady improvement over the years in retail ebook formatting since then, though. At least in the books I buy. Still a clinker every now and then though. Just rarely nasty enough for me to worry about fixing it.

[Joques]

It was some epub retailer, don't know which one. I bought the book many years ago.

I grant you that I should have thought to check the original first - however my (fairly long, now) experience is that publisher error is far, far more likely than Calibre slip-ups - and in this case the most egregious errors were indeed from the publisher and not Calibre

[mgbino]

Meh, if you really want to talk about crappy formatting, I direct you to the Deathstalker series by Simon R. Green.

It was one of my favorites when I was younger, so I bought the kindle versions for a reread... and they are terrible. The first book has basic OCR errors (like occasionally calling one of the main characters Haze instead of Hazel) and contains no spacing for scene breaks.

The second book starts off better, but then is missing an entire paragraph of dialogue in a critical scene... just completely cut off and replaced with "***."


BTW: There is a U.K. only ebook collection of the six Joe Abercrombie books set in the FL universe. The formatting on it is great.

[Joques]

Mgbino, another ebook mess is Stephen Donaldson's GAP series. Tons of OCR errors and also entire parts of the text that were simply missing.

I've learned enough basic formatting now that I can fairly quickly edit most offending books. With a few exceptions. Rothfuss' "The Name of the Wind" had for some reason lots of instances where the space between a period mark and the next capital letter was removed.

It would look like this: "... followed him inside.It was dark."

Lots and lots of instances. That was a lot more work to clean up than I was happy to put up with.

[mgbino]

Originally Posted by Joques

Mgbino, another ebook mess is Stephen Donaldson's GAP series. Tons of OCR errors and also entire parts of the text that were simply missing.

I've learned enough basic formatting now that I can fairly quickly edit most offending books. With a few exceptions. Rothfuss' "The Name of the Wind" had for some reason lots of instances where the space between a period mark and the next capital letter was removed.

It would look like this: "... followed him inside.It was dark."

Lots and lots of instances. That was a lot more work to clean up than I was happy to put up with.

That's a shame about Gap, because that's a great damn series. That's actually another one I was thinking of picking up again, but I might not bother now. I really wish I would held on to some of my old paperbacks.

A couple of the Deathgate Cycle books are pretty terrible. One of them (the third maybe) randomly replaces "I" with "/".

At this point, I've pretty much learned to read about crappy formatting. Typos and formatting errors used to drive me crazy, but I'm okay with almost anything at this point except missing text... that's unacceptable.

[Katsunami]

My (as of yet unread) copy of "Best Served Cold" comes from a Kobo sale. It is an original EPUB (although I also have a version converted to AZW3.)

Everything seems to be OK; no super-large scene breaks, no gaps between dialogs. Can you give me the first few words of the flashback chapters you mention, so I can search for them to check them out?

I've quit using e-readers after three months (I had a Cybook Gen 3, from nov-2007 to feb-2008) because of many books not being available, no or limited conversion possibilities, and almost no possibility to edit the layout. Calibre was still in its infancy and it wasn't even called calibre yet.

After restarting with e-readers again in 2011, I have had to edit many e-books extensively (possible thanks to Sigil), but it would only be fair to point out that my need for editing them is becoming less and less. Very often nowadays the only thing I want to do is to replace the cover with a higher resolution one, or make sure the covers in a series match up. Sometimes, I need to remove a gap between paragraphs, and that's about it. I haven't had to do any extensive editing in a long time.

[JSWolf]

The thing to do is before you complain about how bad an eBook is, make sure you've downloaded the latest version. Go back to the store you bought it from and download it again. eBooks get updated and we don't get notified. The only way to get the latest version is to download the eBook again. I'm not saying all eBooks get updated, but many do.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

My (as of yet unread) copy of "Best Served Cold" comes from a Kobo sale. It is an original EPUB (although I also have a version converted to AZW3.)

Everything seems to be OK; no super-large scene breaks, no gaps between dialogs. Can you give me the first few words of the flashback chapters you mention, so I can search for them to check them out?

Went home and dug out my original mobi version of this book and everything seems OK here, too. No extra spacing between paragraphs (except for scene-breaks and other typical breaks), the scene break spacing doesn't seem excessive (although I tend to to believe that in reflowable books on a six-inch screen, too small is a much worse sin than too large). I'm not entirely sure what is meant by "flashback chapter," but if it's the italicized "history" at the beginning of each new Part (I, II, III, IV... etc) then those appear to be correct as well (or at least consistent)--all in italics until the first chapter following the new Part.

This mobi would have been purchased very close to the book's original pub date.

[Joques]

DiapDealer, yes it's those chapters. Let me see how it is with my version (untouched original):

I Talins: All italic
II Westport: None italic
III Spiani: Starts italic, shifts to non-italic right after "Monza took down ..."
IV Visserine: All non-italic _except_ for the last portion of the 3rd sentence! Weird.
V Puranti: First sentence is italic, the rest is non-italic. It could have worked, but the very first capital letter of that italicized sentenced was _non_-italic for some reason.
VI Ospria: All italics, expect for, again, the very first letter.
VII Talins: Same as VI.

I guess if these chapters are fine and consistent in your versions of the book, then the publisher probably cleaned them up at some point. Which is fine. I realize the standard of formatting is getting better, like Katsunami says.

[Joques]

JSWolf, I bought a very large portion of my ebook library at a vendor that is now defunct (booksonboard.com) No such updates for me.