Awful, just AWFUL formatting in ebooks

[Steven Lake]

Wait, let me get this straight. The only way they'll take an Ebook from you is if you give it to them in word format, and then *THEY* handle the formatting!? Even after I've spent all that time making a high quality epub file!? Oy, that's retarded.

[Logseman]

So far they do. An outrageous majority of writers (and writer-wannabes) uses Microsoft Word, so it's only normal that they use Meat Grinder on that. Not that I don't find silly the fact that you can't just send an ePub and finish. Nevertheless, I guess revising ePubs is probably more costly than using a meat grinder to chop away all the crap from Word.

[Steven Lake]

Honestly, I'd think it'd be easier to meatgrind an epub, since that's open source and fully documented, rather than the closed source, barely documented Microsoft Word.

[Logseman]

Marc Coker (Smashwords' owner) is a Mobileread user and he tends to lurk a bit around, so maybe he'll have good reasons. I for one would like to hear them.

[JSWolf]

This message can be deleted.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

I prefer space between paragraphs, and will always change it to that when it isn't already. Between scenes you should put * * * (or similar). Mainly because some ebook readers will strip out any extra spaces you put in.

I've not seen a format where the spacing used for section breaks has been stripped. So really, if that happens, it's due to buggy software on the reader.

As for a space between paragraphs, that's a deal breaker as the excess space will be a good place to get lost in the poorly formatted eBook instead of properly getting lost in the story.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Logseman

As far as I remember, the only text processor endorsed by Smashwords is Microsoft Word. If you use another one, that's not Meat-Grinder's fault.

Actually, it is. The meat grinder should allow uploading our own formatted versions if you want. That way, the author has complete control. I've seen some pretty nasty files come out of the grinder. Last bad one was all underlined.

[MrPLD]

JSWolf,

I was reading it on my wife's Kindle3

Anyhow, it seems that in a way I've ended up with two threads which have the same cause - essentially the acceptance of only ms-doc files to the meat-grinder.

Jaxx

ToL shows like you spent some time playing with the formatting. Thanks for the Kindle picture.

The beautiful thing is... we didn't.

It's frustrating in as much as it's unfortunately sad to watch so many people waste so many hours on formatting and tweaking all because of this "defacto" format the world knows as ms-doc.

I realise it's very accessible to everyone (even via OpenOffice now) but at some point you have to go "Okay, this is crazy, we're wasting too much time not writing!" and reevaluate one's tools.

Mmm.. I should stop now, I'm starting to sound like an evangelist!

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

It's one thing to criticize authors going through Smashwords... but books by professional authors, issued by major publishers, can be even worse. Especially when they are scanned in and OCR'd.

Every book I've recently bought from Barns & Noble come under the scan-and-OCR area, and without fail, they have had misspellings and formatting errors on at least every other page, far too numerous to catalog. I mean, we're talking about hundreds of spelling/formatting errors in one book. It's atrocious. My sloppiest uploaded text wouldn't contain so many errors. And these are in books that you'll pay $8-$10 for.

Simply put, there ought to be a law protecting consumers from such pathetic formatting, especially at the prices you pay for a book... if it was on paper, you wouldn't have to tolerate such bad formatting, you could show it to any store manager and they wouldn't think twice about refunding your money. But with ebooks, it's somehow okay.

One more thing that will drive consumers to pass on major publishers' works over indie authors who clearly put more work and care into their books.

And don't forget the sloppy standardized (mostly) formatting that we get with most ePub these days. Even if there are no errors in the text, the formatting is line spaces that are sometimes larger then one line, no indents or overly large indents, section breaks that are overly large, small used for the base font so when the text should be smaller then normal, we get xtra-small, and when a drop cap is used, the spacing for the first line is awful. All of this leads to a poor read as we pay attention to the formatting more then the book. We even get something like * * * that was in the paper edition to mark a section break at the end of a page. So the publisher just not know how to make an eBook look good?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Steven Lake

I like playing with Epub because I am in full control of the formatting (I build all my ebooks by hand and custom tweak each one until they're perfect), but the idea of cross converting them between formats bothers me. Especially for the reasons listed here, such as issues with breaks and the like.

Actually, if you start off with a well made ePub, you can usually get a good conversion to Mobipocket and MS Reader using Calibre.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by MrPLD

Well, I stayed with the breaks between the paragraphs but I did go in and fix up the scene-breaks to be forced and visible. With that done I think there's really nothing more I need to do with ToL at this point.

Given that I've re-uploaded it to Amazon, will existing owners get notified about the update?


Paul.

Extra spacing between paragraphs is a good way to cause your readers to focus on the formatting more then the story. When you look at a paperback, you do not see such formatting and rightly so. It's not needed. It's just a mess to the eye when they eye is expecting to go to the next like of text instead of the next line of blank space.

[jaxx6166]

I made it an hour and a half before I lost my mind. Kudos to everyone with the patience to do that

For those curious, I made it to Step 13 in the formatting guide.

Step 13: Working with Images...

PLD, would you be so kind as to check out the formatting in the MR Got Poe anthology and let me know if any glaring errors popped up on your end? Or any reports of piss poor formatting.

I realize that my method pretty much precludes me putting anything into the SW catalog...but it seems too much hassle

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by MrPLD

I agree, the end-user/consumer should not have to do anything to make the book readable on their device.

Here's a photo of the newly formatted ToL, all the scene breaks are now forced to show (unlike the pbook version where they're subjective).

Again, I was going to close up the inter paragraph spacing but Elita made the comment that on the Kindle she found it much easier/faster to read with the spacing in there.

Paul.

I just saw the screen shot and there are a few issues with it. The first issue is that the section break marker is not centered between the two sections. Next is the first paragraph after the section break is indented. When it's not indented, that says, new section. When it's indented, if you happen to miss the section break, you can still know you've hit a new section easily enough. Then we have paragraph spaces that take the reader away from the story and into the format of the book. Sorry, but paragraph spaces do interfere with the book. They cause you to look at the blank space instead of moving on to the next paragraph. The indents are too large. They look silly. A lot of eBooks use 5% and that's just way too big. And lastly, in the second paragraph, two of the lines are not properly justified making it easy to drop out of the story and focus on the formatting.

Other then those issues, it's fine.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by MrPLD

I'm just having a big rant at the moment on another thread here in the Writer's corner - seems that myself and SW are butting heads. I went to submit Elita's "Tree of Life" to Smashwords but they only accept .doc files... now it's starting to become abundantly clear how poorly formatted eBooks are appearing.

I'll probably come across in a very wrong way however this must be said - Microsoft Word is not an ideal platform for generating consistent quality work. Can you do it, yes; is it ideal, no. There's too many nuances and quirks within the ailing doc format which can hide issues that won't appear until after you've submitted it.

Paul.

It's not so much the DOC format that is the issue. It is how Word sticks in a lot of asinine styles that have little or nothing to actually do with what you want done. If all the garbage was not even put in, Word would be a lot better. I've seen the mess you can get and unless you are converting to ePub, you'll never get it fixed. in ePub, you can fix the mess after the ePub is made and it's a lot easier to fix the mess in the ePub then it is in Word.

[jaxx6166]

Huh. Jon, I didn't see that. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough

I actually enjoy the paragraph spacing on that size, but I know it will only cause problems should I lose my eyesight and need to increase the font spacing.