You too can be an Amazon Publisher!

[Donnageddon]

Today I was looking at the latest ebook uploads on my favorite Blog MobileRead, and I noticed an upload of Where No Man Has Gone Before by W. David Compton. The uploader is mrmikel, and I think he has done a great job, (find it here) The formatting is fine, and it has a working TOC, and footnotes that are linked. All in all , I am impressed! But the upload is for LRF only, and I thought I would give a try at making an IMP and mobipocket version (I still have that as an aim, if only for my own use). But mrmikel obviously really DID work hard on this upload! The book at the NASA site is filled with all those footnotes and references and such, so I decided to only copy the "aside" footnotes and not include the bibliographical footnotes, in order to make an easier, breezier read.

I finished Chapter 6, when I thought I would check to see if any other ebook retailer had this book in other formats. No such luck, but I did find a book by W. David Compton for the Amazon Kindle called Living and Working in Space - A History of Skylab (Kindle Edition)

Link here

Only 99 cents, so I decided to download it and see how it's formatting worked. It sucked. Not even near the good quality of mrmikel's upload. It was horrendous, sentences stopping short and continuing on the next line down for no good reason. And no linked TOC or linked footnotes (the footnotes are there but not linked).

And the publisher is?

LeClue22

Not a publishing house I am familiar with.

I can only assume this is a person who took the initiative to take an ebook freely available on the web, do a piss poor format of it for the Kindle, and then charge 99 cents for it.

I assume he covered what bases are needed to be covered to do such a thing... but damn, that is just wrong.

So, if anyone has absolutely loose moral values, and wants to make a buck off of suckers like me, just get a deal with Amazon and steal publish any old crap you want on Amazon.

[TadW]

Originally Posted by Donnageddon

Only 99 cents, so I decided to download it and see how it's formatting worked. It sucked. Not even near the good quality of mrmikel's upload. It was horrendous, sentences stopping short and continuing on the next line down for no good reason. And no linked TOC or linked footnotes (the footnotes are there but not linked)... I can only assume this is a person who took the initiative to take an ebook freely available on the web, do a piss poor format of it for the Kindle, and then charge 99 cents for it.

And here lies the fundamental flaw in Amazon's Digital Text Platform: No quality control. My personal solution is to stick to known publishing houses when purchasing e-books.