The Reading Vent & Rant Thread

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I'm reading the newest Cormoran Strike novel (Jo Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith), on Kindle and

OHMYFLIPPINGGOD!

(fear not, no plot spoilers)

The bloody eBook formatting is abysmal. I mean, horrible. Much of the book takes place in chatrooms, ICQs and the like. They could have taken myriad different paths to conveying this locales, text etc to the reader, but noooooooooooooo.

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture...g-insular-long

May have spoilers.

And no book should contain this many tweets. Twitter may be very realistically rendered in the novel, but that does not mean you want to read a series of tweets. Twitter, as Rowling would be the first to argue, is awful. In certain sections, the novel is written in the form of brain-melting simultaneous chat-threads lifted from the game Anomie runs, a game that, incidentally, it is hard to imagine anybody being invested in because neither its appeal nor its rules are convincingly explained.

Perhaps better formatting can't save this novel?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Quoth

2) I can't imagine Debbie Harry as a novel writer. But some unlikely people have written good books.

Ghost writer or another author to help out.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Perhaps better formatting can't save this novel?

I can't say as I've not started reading this yet. But, if you do get to the images with the text and find the text too small, if you can zoom is, then you can read the text. But if you have an eInk screen of 6" or smaller the image text is going to be too small. Especially on a Kindle.

If you have a 7" screen, it may or may not be too small. If it is still too small, then if you have a tablet, give that a go. I have an old iPad that I can use if I wanted.

The strange thing is that while there is the text images, behind it with CSS code to hide the text is the same text in these text images as actual text. There is only one image that cannot be text and has to be the image. But that one is not going to be much of a problem.

I've edited it to hide the images and show the text. So that should be OK when I do go to read it. The other issue is that this is a rather large book and if you bought it as an eBook, then good luck as most won't be able to deal with it other then give up.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by Quoth

I enjoyed HP, but thought it was poor plotting & and dialogue tags. "Let's fill the plot hole with magic never yet mentioned".

I think this was the main problem with reading it as an adult. There were a few places where I suspect the author had written herself into a corner and just made up crap to fix it.

[icallaci]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I've edited it to hide the images and show the text. So that should be OK when I do go to read it.

I tried this too (hiding the images and displaying the text), but the images show each column as a separate, unrelated chat. The text behind the images is formatted in one long stream, so you get unrelated chats one right after another (or sometimes mixed together) instead of in columns, which makes absolutely no sense and is impossible to follow. It is the biggest mess I've seen in a very long time.

Edited to add: the odd thing is that some of the chats are actually formatted using tables, so either several people were assigned to different parts of the book and didn't coordinate with each other, or else someone started out trying to format the chats correctly but gave up after a bazillion hours of work in order to meet the deadline.

[Quoth]

Side by side formatting:
But who can read multiple twitter threads at the same time?
It's rare it's real time and any sane person reads threads sequentially.

Even if the book is brilliant, the ebook formatting is stupid and paper or ebook having side by side twitter posts like a newspaper or bible columns is daft.

Since the current Twitter threadfall kicked off in early 2016, we can expect it to continue until the mid 2060s when the next Interval begins.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by icallaci

Edited to add: the odd thing is that some of the chats are actually formatted using tables, so either several people were assigned to different parts of the book and didn't coordinate with each other, or else someone started out trying to format the chats correctly but gave up after a bazillion hours of work in order to meet the deadline.

And did anyone sane proof either version for paper, or proof the ebook version on an ereader?

I've noticed that since Wordprocessing has become common people seem to be relying on spelling & grammar checkers not expert humans.
Some newer books are worse proofed than average old PD proofed for Gutenberg.
Correctly spelled completely wrong words; Harper Collins, Penguin Random House, not just SP or small indies.

Alternate valid spelling of same word even in same chapter. We started deleting alternate spellings we don't want from the spelling dictionary in use.

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Correctly spelled completely wrong words

The one that surprises me with its frequency is "discrete" for "discreet". "Loose" for "lose" is widely looked down, yet even authors (and their editors) who display far too much wordcraft to make that error, still fail to separate the other two.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by icallaci

I tried this too (hiding the images and displaying the text), but the images show each column as a separate, unrelated chat. The text behind the images is formatted in one long stream, so you get unrelated chats one right after another (or sometimes mixed together) instead of in columns, which makes absolutely no sense and is impossible to follow. It is the biggest mess I've seen in a very long time.

Edited to add: the odd thing is that some of the chats are actually formatted using tables, so either several people were assigned to different parts of the book and didn't coordinate with each other, or else someone started out trying to format the chats correctly but gave up after a bazillion hours of work in order to meet the deadline.

I haven't found any tables yet. Only images. I've yet to see any of these side-by-sides or worse, triple side-bys, resize the font or give me table zoom.

Hitch

[Deskisamess]

Originally Posted by Uncle Robin

The one that surprises me with its frequency is "discrete" for "discreet". "Loose" for "lose" is widely looked down, yet even authors (and their editors) who display far too much wordcraft to make that error, still fail to separate the other two.

One I've seen several times recently is "past" and "passed". Example:

How would she ever tell him all of the things from her passed?

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Side by side formatting:
But who can read multiple twitter threads at the same time?
It's rare it's real time and any sane person reads threads sequentially.

Even if the book is brilliant, the ebook formatting is stupid and paper or ebook having side by side twitter posts like a newspaper or bible columns is daft.

(That tweet cracks me up.)

You're....we're inadvertently misleading you. In the novel, you are not reading multiple Twitter threads at once. You read them the same way that you do in the real world--sequentially.

What is annoying and irksome is this idea that for some reason, we're going to read three different PM chats (Private Room chats), which basically look like ICQ chats from oh-dark-20th-Century, in 3 columns spread across the page so we're going to do...what? Read left-to-right, losing the track altogether? No, nobody is going to do that. They're going to read the left-most (assuming English language or L2R version, sports fans), then when they get to the bottom fo the page, they'll look to the middle column, lather-rinse-repeat and what they MIGHT look for, MIGHT, is wehther a perpetrator or typist might be two different avatars, typing in two different places, at slightly different times.

That's about it.

I am not the World's Greatest eBook Designer. But dayam, I would have found a far better way to do this. Perhaps use vertical stacking and interrupt threads, one with another, in some visual way. It's just...the kindest word I can use here is CLUNKY and it rips me out of the story constantly.

P.S. for those of you commenting--I didn't say that Debbie Harry had written a novel. I said it was a memoir. :-)

Hitch

[John F]

I am currently read The Ink Black Heart and enjoying it. The images are annoying. Seeing as how it is a mystery novel, I assume they are doing the side-by-side chats to show something, or that is how a user would see it.

[icallaci]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I haven't found any tables yet. Only images. I've yet to see any of these side-by-sides or worse, triple side-bys, resize the font or give me table zoom.

There are 15 tables in the epub version of the book. An example of a side-by-side chat using a table comes immediately after this sentence: "Before she could consider that point any further, two dialogue boxes opened simultaneously in front of her." It would be interesting to know if the Kindle version uses an image, while the epub version displays the text in a table.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by John F

I am currently read The Ink Black Heart and enjoying it. The images are annoying. Seeing as how it is a mystery novel, I assume they are doing the side-by-side chats to show something, or that is how a user would see it.

The images ARE annoying and ill-conceived, IMHO. I don't/wouldn't/can't compare myself to Jo Rowling in the world of imagination (snort) but FFS, you'd think that somebody left-brained at the publishing house woulda said, "Hey, Jo...."

Originally Posted by icallaci

There are 15 tables in the epub version of the book. An example of a side-by-side chat using a table comes immediately after this sentence: "Before she could consider that point any further, two dialogue boxes opened simultaneously in front of her." It would be interesting to know if the Kindle version uses an image, while the epub version displays the text in a table.

Wolfie said something similar to me. I'm wondering if they ARE different. Honestly, I'd be surprised. Most trade publishers today use the larger Indian companies for formatting and they take the path of least resistance--One File to Rule Them All--so that they can FTP the same ePUB file to all vendors.

Hitch

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Hitch

(That tweet cracks me up.)

You're....we're inadvertently misleading you. In the novel, you are not reading multiple Twitter threads at once. You read them the same way that you do in the real world--sequentially.

No, I wasn't misled. What I meant was that the formatting suggested a need for parallelism, which is crazy. Trying to save paper on print edition?