Touch Does Kobo care?

[latepaul]

Originally Posted by tkavan

True, Best Buy doesn't test every single product. But every single product is a distinct physical entity, and there are probably millions of them in a Best Buy store. With an ebook, we're talking about a single file to be checked and fixed.

Kobo claim to have 2.5 million titles in their store (which includes magazines). Even if they did do spot checks any reasonable sample would be a huge task.

- Determine specifications for a book to display properly on their reader; inform publishers of these specifications; and ensure that publishers certify each book file as meeting these specifications.

Without repeating what others have said, I think the short answer is they do but mistakes slip through. No publisher is going to certify that their books are free from typos any more than they intend them in the first place. The best you can hope for is that they'll be willing to fix and update them.

- Do at least spot-checks to make sure that books do display properly on their reader.

I suspect they do for mainstream bestsellers. Even then I doubt that they proof-read every page in every book checked. There might be a subset of the subset they do that for.

- From the customer service point of view, be more proactive than just telling a customer that it's a publisher problem and they will inform the publisher of the complaint. That, in my experience, is a black hole from which nothing further is heard.

I think they need to inform publishers but they need to make sure that it doesn't appear as a "black hole". Maybe publishers need to get together and create a site where customers can report errors and track whether and when new versions are released. Retailers like Kobo could then get a link to such a site.

Also remember that Kobo don't own the copyright on these books. The publishers either own it or have rights to it. Which means that Kobo can't just go changing the text of these books without some form of agreement. They probably do have agreements in place in order to produce kepubs but I doubt that gives them to right to fix typos in epubs, and even with kepubs I suspect the publishers would want to be consulted.

[rashkae]

I forget the details of my testing, but I'm fairly sure that the No space following italicized words was an artifact introduced by "koboization." Is that still happening with new books? or is it just old books that haven't been fixed? In either case, the epub probably doesn't have this particular error.

[tkavan]

Originally Posted by latepaul

Also remember that Kobo don't own the copyright on these books. The publishers either own it or have rights to it. Which means that Kobo can't just go changing the text of these books without some form of agreement. They probably do have agreements in place in order to produce kepubs but I doubt that gives them to right to fix typos in epubs, and even with kepubs I suspect the publishers would want to be consulted.

Good point on the copyright, though I assume that publishers would want their product to be as error-free as possible.

BTW I regard the things I've mentioned, and the things other posters have mentioned such as unexpected font-size changes, not as typos, but as programming errors. They are relatively small in number and it seems to me -- a non-programmer, I hasten to say -- that it would not be a major task to fix them, at least for new books.

Thanks for your detailed reply to my post.

[JD Gumby]

Originally Posted by rashkae

I forget the details of my testing, but I'm fairly sure that the No space following italicized words was an artifact introduced by "koboization." Is that still happening with new books? or is it just old books that haven't been fixed? In either case, the epub probably doesn't have this particular error.

Doubt it's just kepubs. I've got several sideloads where there's the opposite problem - no space *before* italicized words - though I saw the no space after italics in a library book I borrowed last year...

[murg]

Originally Posted by tkavan

Good point on the copyright, though I assume that publishers would want their product to be as error-free as possible.

Publishers want you to buy the book. They really don't care about the quality.

[winsomnia]

Originally Posted by latepaul

Maybe publishers need to get together and create a site where customers can report errors and track whether and when new versions are released. Retailers like Kobo could then get a link to such a site.

I've wished for the same thing myself. I find myself completely taken away from the reading experience if there are many grammar and spelling errors. I would love to send publishers my findings of their publishing errors but I'm cynical and don't believe they'll do anything about a few spelling mistakes (if that's all there is).

However, I bought an epub (from Kobobooks) by a big publisher, and found a huge format error, informed the publisher by email, and ended up getting them to fix the issue. It was merely a case of an html file which was in the epub but incorrectly showing up (in the wrong place) at the end of the book. I knew this because I own a paperback copy of the novel and was familiar with the story.

Epub publishers should give us an easy way to tell them when we find errors. It would make me more confident in buying their ebooks, if I knew they were committed to fixing spelling/grammar mistakes.

Off topic:
It really bugs me when people use inflammatory thread titles which actually tell us very little about the problem. The only thing the thread title tells us is there is a problem and someone is angry. I wish people could pay more attention to the title when starting a new thread, so that people will actually have a reason to read the thread and not just open it because they want to find out what the subject actually is.