Most Irritating Thing About eBooks You Download

[Gideon]

So what bugs you when you get a brand new ebook? Free, purchased, etc?


What bugs me the most? When I get a work of non-fiction or a book of short stories and they do not include a table of contents! Drives me absolutely bonkers!!!

What about you?

[montsnmags]

I think it's that in the public domain books there can sometimes be so many errors from straight OCR'ing-without-checking (which is why I usually download from MobileRead - they've most often been created by people whose love extends to thorough scanning for errors. Thanks!).

I had this thought...imagine doing a simple OCR and upload of Finnegans Wake. (Aside from verifying against another text) How would know they were errors of OCR?

Cheers,
Marc

[astra]

Eventhough I pay my money for ebooks I still have to spend 1-2 hours to edit them for my taste.

Hmm...on the other hand it is a good thing that I have this opportunity to edit ebook to my liking. Otherwise I would use calibre?

[TallMomof2]

1. DRM, I try to stay away but many of the books I want to read have it
2. OCR errors
3. No hyperlinked TOC
4. Poor editing

[rhadin]

Originally Posted by TallMomof2

4. Poor editing

Unfortunately, your last point, while valid, will remain with us as long as books are produced by companies that need to produce quarterly returns for shareholders and there are p-books. Publishers are unable to control distribution costs of p-books. They are also unable to control much of the production cost, especially when they have to accept returns of unsold books. Consequently, those costs that they can control -- editorial being a major one -- they squeeze for savings. Thus we end up with books edited -- assuming they are edited at all -- by low-skilled editors.

I would add that this problem is compounded by the quality of some of the publishers' inhouse editorial staff. They are not well-versed in the editing function and have low skills themselves and thus are unable to discern a good editing job from a poor editing job. In fairness, the inhouse staff also rarely has time or opportunity to improve its skill level because of the number of books they are expected to process.

At least in the U.S., and I suspect this is true elsewhere, the command of English language skills is in great decline among students at all levels of education. And as those who teach English have lesser skills, so their students have even lesser skills, and the cycle continues.

Even university presses are subject to these failings, witness the recent recall of a print run by Princeton University Press of a newly published book because of all the editorial errors. PUP ultimately claimed that it used an inexperienced editor, but that was probably the only level of editor it could get because of the low skillset among newer editors and the low pay rate presses offer.

[mores]

I hate it when meta-data is missing.
Like, you download a file. First of all, it's probably just the title of the book with ".prc" or ".pdb" or whatever at the end.
So you rename that to your liking, like most people, Last Name, First Name - Title
Then you beam it to your device and see what?
Just the title, or an abbreviated title, or even some funny code that tells you nothing.

argh!

[zelda_pinwheel]

i hate that too. also ocr errors. also bad editing. almost everything everyone has said so far, in fact.

[Ervserver]

I don't mind minor formatting errors but when books have all the words hyphenated or there are 6 lines of space in between each sentence.

[DixieGal]

Hate to tell you this, but the only thing I hate about e-books is the fact that I have to occasionally stop reading to work and eat. Format doesn't matter - I'm as happy reading pdf's on my computer as I am reading imp's on my EB-1150.

I love e-books!

[zelda_pinwheel]

i hope you don't mind if i borrow (*cough*steal*cough*) that title from you one of these days, DixieGal. i sense i'm going to find plenty of use for it, possibly wholly unrelated to ebooks.

[DixieGal]

I'd consider it an honor to have you steal it!

[MoSo]

Originally Posted by montsnmags

I think it's that in the public domain books there can sometimes be so many errors from straight OCR'ing-without-checking (which is why I usually download from MobileRead - they've most often been created by people whose love extends to thorough scanning for errors. Thanks!).

I had this thought...imagine doing a simple OCR and upload of Finnegans Wake. (Aside from verifying against another text) How would know they were errors of OCR?

Cheers,
Marc

When I worked for a newspaper and we published legal notices in Spanish - a language none of us spoke natively - we proofread them against the original copy end-to-front, word by word. You'd have to do the same there.

I occasionally proofread for Distributed Proofreaders, and I have to say that most of the newly scanned things have very, very few OCR/scanner errors.

[GeoffC]

General lack of proof-reading...seems more common in e-books, than in the printed version...(and these be legally purchased e-books).

[Over]

Until I buy the Cybook (just holding on a few days before finally doing it), I'm only checking free samples from Mobipocket and some free ebooks from here.

The irritating thing? I like fantasy books. And many of them have maps with them. In the samples I've checked I can only see those maps with the size of thumbnails. If I zoom, it becomes unreadable. The thumbnail size doesn't even let me see the landscape, much less read the names in it...

I wonder if it's because of being just a sample, or if that's how it is in the retail version.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Over

The irritating thing? I like fantasy books. And many of them have maps with them. In the samples I've checked I can only see those maps with the size of thumbnails. If I zoom, it becomes unreadable. The thumbnail size doesn't even let me see the landscape, much less read the names in it...

I wonder if it's because of being just a sample, or if that's how it is in the retail version.

That could be a good thing. Fantasy books without maps are usually better...

The map will probably be small in the real book also. The reason is that old programs or methods have been used for the conversion. In some cases I thing you get larger images if you buy the lit version and convert to MobiPocket.