Hall of Shame

[FatDog]

It's an old link but TeleRead has an article from a publisher talking about how a perfectly formatted ebook looks different based on the platform.


http://www.teleread.com/2010/02/09/e...asy-or-simple/

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by FatDog

It's an old link but TeleRead has an article from a publisher talking about how a perfectly formatted ebook looks different based on the platform.


http://www.teleread.com/2010/02/09/e...asy-or-simple/

That's a good article, but still with some weaknesses. If a book goes out with a publisher's colophon then it's surely still the publisher's responsibility if the 'middleman' (eg Amazon) makes a mess of the formatting. The publisher has a responsibility to proof read what Amazon produces, and if they make a mess badger Amazon until they fix it. If the publisher doesn't want to take this trouble then it should remove its colophon. They can't have it both ways.

Regards, Alex

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by L.J. Sellers

Maybe those who distribute e-books should establish quality control standards and reject anything shoddy, with idea that the publisher should correct the problems and resubmit. It may slightly drive up prices but I think it would be worth it.
L.J.

Many publishers have a standard. Seems to be large margins, small font, spaces between paragraphs. Not what I call a well formatted eBook.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by FatDog

It's an old link but TeleRead has an article from a publisher talking about how a perfectly formatted ebook looks different based on the platform.


http://www.teleread.com/2010/02/09/e...asy-or-simple/

What a bunch of nonsense. A well formatted ePub can look good on my 505, ADE for the desktop or laptop, and iPad using iBooks. So really, where is the problem with a well formatted ePub?

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Many publishers have a standard. Seems to be large margins, small font, spaces between paragraphs. Not what I call a well formatted eBook.

The Hanvon, with the original firmware, puts page numbers in the right hand margin, so if that is set at any less than 17pt, the page numbers will crash into the text once it gets into 3 figures. I don't know if that affects any other readers or not. At a guess, the small fonts will be because they know you can zoom in if you want to?

[WillAdams]

Has anyone had any luck reporting errors and getting them fixed? Do we have contact information for the publishers or Sony to report errors?

I purchased Robert Heinlein's _Space Cadet_ and (tried to) read it over the weekend --- the book had so many errors, I wound up proofreading it instead:

- all discretionary and non-breaking hyphens show up as question marks in the text
- lots of extraneous hyphens
- a couple of chapter titles are mis-spelled
- There're a couple of typos which are so bad as to confuse the meaning of the text (a word specifically referencing a tabu mentioned in an earlier paragraph is replaced w/ gibberish)
- they even get the year of his birth wrong on the last page, rendering it as 190? instead of 1907

Here's an e-mail I sent to Tor Books:

I purchased a copy of Heinlein's _Space Cadet_ and it was so rife w/ errors that rather than enjoying reading it, I found myself proofreading it over the weekend. Apparently this ebook was _never_ proofread, since it has numerous errors, including mis-spelled chapter heads, question marks placed wherever there was a discretionary or non-breaking hyphen, a slash instead of an italic capital ``I'', &c.

I've got a 42MB Notes file exported from my Sony PRS-600 which highlights all of the errors, things like:

Inside front cover:
``From Mars to Venus—to danger-filled advenTures...''
- should be adventures

``...ever managed to become Space Cadets at the Space Academy Young men such as Matt and Tex...''
- missing period, should be ``...Space Academy. Young men...''

pg. 11 ``... thin air stood Hay-worth Hall...''
- extraneous hyphen, should be Hayworth

pg. 22 ``...it had a score showing in it—"yjT Well, he thought...''
- missing end punctuation and closing quote mark, the score is gibberish--- should be ``37'' (had to look that up on the Google Books copy).

pg. 27 ``Lieutenant Ezra Dahlguisty Who Helped Create the Tradition of the Patrol—ig6g-igg6.
- Dahlquist. gibberish at the end should be a pair of years, probably 1969--1996.

pg. 30 ``Don't play 'iron man.'There's no sense...''
- space missing between single quote and ``T''

And it goes on and on like that, w/ a lot of the errors actually confusing the meaning of the text.


William

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by WillAdams

Has anyone had any luck reporting errors and getting them fixed? Do we have contact information for the publishers or Sony to report errors?

William

I got a refund from Fictionwise a year or so ago, and a response from Clarity Press and Amazon more recently - but no action.

Regards, Alex

[JSWolf]

I'm reading Living Dead in Dallas (ePub) and there is a missing space after or before almost every italics. And in the CSS it says that it was converted from a PDF copy. Why the hell do publishers think that PDF is a good source format for the other eBook copies? Stupid publishers.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

there is a missing space after or before almost every italics.

That is very common with epub, but I don't know what causes it. Does it say what was used to convert it? The only way around it I've found is to go PDF to Mobi with Mobireader, Mobi to RTF with Calibre, then RTF to Epub with Calibre.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I'm reading Living Dead in Dallas (ePub) and there is a missing space after or before almost every italics. And in the CSS it says that it was converted from a PDF copy. Why the hell do publishers think that PDF is a good source format for the other eBook copies? Stupid publishers.

That's strange for that particular book. It's been out in other ebook formats for years and they could have sourced the ePub from one of those instead of a PDF.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

That's strange for that particular book. It's been out in other ebook formats for years and they could have sourced the ePub from one of those instead of a PDF.

The following is what I found at the beginning of the CSS for Living Dead in Dallas

/* Textcafe version pdf2xml_2.0s54, */
/* A technology developed by Texterity, Inc - www.texterity.com */

So yes, it does seem to be a PDF conversion.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

So yes, it does seem to be a PDF conversion.

Oh, I wasn't doubting you. Just commenting that it was odd.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

Oh, I wasn't doubting you. Just commenting that it was odd.

To be honest, it's not as odd as you think. I've read about a lot more PDFs being used as a source for eBook creation. A lot of publishers don't get it.

[neilmarr]

Right you are, Jon. Using a PDF as source is lazy and usually produces a sloppy result. There are occult errors in a seemingly perfect PDF file that will glare at you if converted to other formats without post-editing. Cheers. Neil

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by neilmarr

Right you are, Jon. Using a PDF as source is lazy and usually produces a sloppy result. There are occult errors in a seemingly perfect PDF file that will glare at you if converted to other formats without post-editing. Cheers. Neil

Lazy, but understandable. PDF will be what they send to the printers. But if they are doing it for that reason, it wouldn't explain why the ebooks have a lot more spelling mistakes in them than the print versions.