Pet E-book peeves

[Lexi Revellian]

Originally Posted by Kumabjorn

Mine is that due to page breaks, sometimes when you turn a page there is a single word on the top of the page. I believe in printing they talk about widows and bastards, and they are a no-no. In electronic publishing, are they unavoidable?

As a writer, this sort of thing really bugs me. I care a lot about how my books look.

I've just done the typography for the paperback version, and I loved the way I can control everything; the font, font size, spacing, headers, numbering, and general layout. Formatting for the Kindle and Smashwords was a different matter. The best I could do was make the formatting consistent and hope for the best.

[GeoffC]

Book covers missing, good old Calibre sorts that one out !
Blank pages - as mentioned by others.
Chapters that are poorly defined, I do like them with at least more than a line spacing!
Chapters defined as links - upsets my down button for page turn on Gen3.

Too many books on my TBR list - never had this problem with paper

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

If you had a reader that used ePub via ADE, you'd have widows and orphans on by default and it works.

You mean widow and orphan avoidance, I guess.

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by Jellby

You mean widow and orphan avoidance, I guess.

stay alive ?

[ATimson]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

That the software doesn't justify lines or legitimize bastards or make sure A River Doesn't Run Through It is something they DON'T provide, not something that they CAN'T provide.

I agree that justification or avoiding widows/orphans can be done programmatically, and relatively easily to boot. Not so a river.

[Ben Thornton]

Originally Posted by ATimson

I agree that justification or avoiding widows/orphans can be done programmatically, and relatively easily to boot. Not so a river.

You could detect a river programmatically - it's just more difficult than the widows/orphans thing.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

Just get a can of this and you're all set

How do I spray an e-book with it?

[GeoffC]

carefully ?

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by GeoffC

carefully ?

No, that applies to amorous pocupines.

[Kumabjorn]

Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald

How do I spray an e-book with it?

On the jacket?

[simplyparticular]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

Just get a can of this and you're all set

I love it! Especially the last one! I used to sniff-test any books bought at used sales because I didn't want the musty nasty ones. I've got a stack of 1980s MMPBs I need to scan because they spent too much time in a basement apartment, even inside a sealed container.

Personally, I think one of the improvements of electronic reading devices is the lack of smell. Several of my family members who smoke have asked to borrow p-books and I always declined unless I didn't want the book back. Now, I don't have to be a meanie.

ETA: And my pet peeve is section breaks. Too many e-Books don't have them, so you can't tell when a scene shifts, a character POV changes, or in nonfiction, the subject changes. Drives me batty to re-read two paragraphs that *appear* consecutive, but just needed to be separated in some way to make clear to the reader that there was a change.

[jlg432]

" Originally Posted by Kumabjorn View Post
Mine is that due to page breaks, sometimes when you turn a page there is a single word on the top of the page. I believe in printing they talk about widows and bastards, and they are a no-no. In electronic publishing, are they unavoidable?"

Are we talking about digital original source or a digitized copy of a hardcopy? I assume one version would require more work than the other to produce a version that is fluid and can accommodate all the different screen sizes available.

[patrickt]

Widwos and orphans. How about sentence fragnments ending one paragraph and beginning the next paragraph? How about wrong words such as "pint" for "point". How about a sentence beginning "AS" instead of "As". How about blank pages inserted for no discernable reason? I find the poor quality of the books is inexcusable. It interferes with the mechanics of reading the pleasure of reading.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by Kumabjorn

On the jacket?

Um...what jacket?

[SensualPoet]

I love typography; I used to be part of the profession. But e-books simply don't have typography so i can let that go.

My most consistent experience has been Kindle books (I have Kobo, Smashwords, Fictionwise commercial titles in my library as well). A few basics really help: justification; no margins; paragraph indents; no extra space between paragraphs; section indicators where applicable ( * * * * will do); page breaks at each chapter; a clickable table of contents; a proper book-like cover; and in publication data. On the whole, Kindle delivers the above and, on the whole, others do so sporadically. Smashwords seems especially bad turning a book into two long chapters broken in the middle of a chapter.

The other thing is unnecessary typos from "real" publishers. I am reading Rex Stout's Three Doors to Death right now, from Random House, and some of the typos leave me really puzzled trying to figure them out. I get that they were scanned and OCRed but I don't get why the final text, and the scan, are not compared by hand and corrected. It could even be outsourced off-shore; I can't imagine it would add more than $200 or so to the ebook production which is easily amortized over any realistic sales demand.