Spoiled Kindle experience: too much sloppy content

[pidgeon92]

Originally Posted by kevinp

And how many dead-tree versions have you had to return? Probably none...that is the point.

The quote in the original post said "The frequency of typographical errors, sloppy layout and poor image quality, even on my relatively small sample of around twenty titles, has made me wonder if the 'e' in ebook stands for easy money."

This suggests that a high percentage of ebooks have significant errors. This is the point that I was refuting.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by pidgeon92

The quote in the original post said "The frequency of typographical errors, sloppy layout and poor image quality, even on my relatively small sample of around twenty titles, has made me wonder if the 'e' in ebook stands for easy money."

This suggests that a high percentage of ebooks have significant errors. This is the point that I was refuting.

If you read the article you will see that he reads mostly non-fiction and the examples given are non-fiction. So are you reading mostly non-fiction? If not you have not refuted the point.

[QuantumIguana]

Originally Posted by Calenorn

I can't understand why companies like Amazon and B&N allow poorly executed self-published e-books to be sold on their sites. Many titles are public domain works offered for free. I don't see how anyone makes any money off those, and if they are giving the company a reputation for selling poor quality products that's bad news for the vendor. The whole thing seems like it's completely out of control.

Amazon and B&N offer free public domain books for the same reasons that casinos give out free drinks: to keep you from going elsewhere. They could decline to carry free public domain books, but the result of that is that people would go to other sources for books, and the more they do that, the more likely that they will continue to get books from other sources.

By offering free public domain books, they keep you within their store, and the more you are in their store, the more likely you are to spend money there.

Offering a vast range of books, which may or may not be good, certainly hasn't harmed Amazon. Perhaps there is a market for an e-bookstore where the books are vetted, but choice seems to have won out.

[haydnfan]

Some of the posters here are paranoid. I have a much more logical, grounded explanation for why this happens. The publishers in a rush churned out millions of back catalogue books in the course of a few years. With that kind of rush quality control is at a minimum. No need to jump to unfounded conclusions that they are doing it on purpose. The same thing happened when dvds took off.

[pl001]

Originally Posted by haydnfan

Some of the posters here are paranoid. I have a much more logical, grounded explanation for why this happens. The publishers in a rush churned out millions of back catalogue books in the course of a few years. With that kind of rush quality control is at a minimum. No need to jump to unfounded conclusions that they are doing it on purpose. The same thing happened when dvds took off.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking as well. Most of my issues are with older ones that didn't originally come out in an e-book.

I have bought hundreds of eBooks from multitudes of bookstores. I too notice a significant rise in typographical, formatting, spelling, and grammatical errors in eBooks as opposed to printed books. I do not read much fiction. But at any rate there is no reason to try to deny there is a higher percentage of sloppy eBooks than Print books. There are several threads in different forums here that discuss this major issue.

Part of the reason is that many print books tend to have a larger publishing staff of professional editors, technicians, etc. They know their jobs and the tools they use and do a better job than what we see in eBooks. Print publishing companies still don't have a good grasp of eBook development and formatting. Hell, just peek at the formatting of a few eBooks at random and you will see the biggest pile of internal formatting garbage you can imagine. Ebook publishers just don't understand HTML, CSS, etc. and how it should be used to create eBooks. They tend to use a lot of <SPAN> and <DIV> rather than using cleaner, more standardized HTML. I've seen a lot of eBooks that use no <H#> tags for headings. All of their headings are <P> tags with a CLASS id to make it do what a heading tag was designed to do. It is sloppy crap. I also see a lot of <SPAN> tags used to assign formatting and fonts. Again, sloppy. The sloppier the HTML the more likely a formatting issue will occur.

Another reason many eBooks suck compared to their printed versions is that publishing companies don't always keep the digital files they used to create the printed version. When they go back a few years later to create the eBook version they have to quickly and inexpensively digitize the text and then format it for an eBook. This process often produces spelling errors and if they don't thoroughly edit the digitized text we will see these errors.

Obviously there are a lot of self-published eBooks. These are perhaps more likely to have errors as they often are not professionally edited.

[Calenorn]

Originally Posted by QuantumIguana

Amazon and B&N offer free public domain books for the same reasons that casinos give out free drinks: to keep you from going elsewhere.

But if the drinks taste awful I won't go back!

When I need a public domain title I come here or go to ManyBooks for it. When the big stores allow so many of the free e-books offered to be so terrible in quality it has the opposite effect, at least in my case.

[Tim_A]

If it's an old back-catalogue book, the ebook version is probably built from an OCRd scan of the print book. Easy to imagine errors and typos getting in that way. Newer books submitted to the publisher as Word files should have identical text regardless of the format. (which is not to say they will be typo-free, as with even the best will in the world, the odd one can slip through)

[glnnjnsn]

Originally Posted by haydnfan

Some of the posters here are paranoid. I have a much more logical, grounded explanation for why this happens. The publishers in a rush churned out millions of back catalogue books in the course of a few years. With that kind of rush quality control is at a minimum. No need to jump to unfounded conclusions that they are doing it on purpose. The same thing happened when dvds took off.

This seems to fit in with my experience, biased as it is (fewer indie-published titles and more public domain "classics" than most people I know). The worst and most frequent offenders are old titles that appear to have had errors creep in during the translation from page to pixel. I just finished reading a free copy of King Solomon's Mines, for example, where every exclamation mark was replaced with "I" - very annoying and at times confusing.

Perhaps most illogically of all, is that the free public domain works such as those from manybooks.net or Project Gutenberg tend to be better in quality than those that have a nominal price. So I don't entirely discount the possible "out to make a fast buck" motivation either.

Another factor is that it would seem, at least to me, to make sense for publishers to be more careful with printed copies. Defective print copies can't be as quickly/easily/cheaply replaced with corrected versions.

[QuantumIguana]

Originally Posted by Calenorn

But if the drinks taste awful I won't go back!

When I need a public domain title I come here or go to ManyBooks for it. When the big stores allow so many of the free e-books offered to be so terrible in quality it has the opposite effect, at least in my case.

What you or I might do isn't really all that important. There are a whole lot of people who will go for the convenience of getting books from the Amazon website instead of sideloading the books. Amazon is doing quite well, after all. Is there really a difference in quality in the public domain books Amazon offers vs. what ManyBooks offers? Amazon could vet the books that they sell, but that would cost a lot of money, and they wouldn't likely recoup that money.

[jgaiser]

Originally Posted by tompe

If you read the article you will see that he reads mostly non-fiction and the examples given are non-fiction. So are you reading mostly non-fiction? If not you have not refuted the point.

I read about 2/3 fiction - 1/3 non-fiction. I have over 600 books on my Kindle account. 99% are non-selfpublished. The number of crappy formatted books I've seen can be counted on one hand.

[crdf]

I must say the Kindles are usually full of errors. I was wondering. For a lot of self-published authors it is better to sell e-books. If a self-published paperback costs £6-8, the author earns less then £1, but if a kindle costs £2-4, they earn maybe more then £2. I can ask friends for more exact numbers.

Now in this case, they will not have editors, but when a book sells to a publisher the cost is not only for the paper, and ink but for advertising of the book and edits. For those e-books that come from such a publishing houses I don't understand why they would be full wit mistakes. I would think they are using the same files that were edited?

Anyway I can see some logic why a self-published book will have more errors then a book that has been sold trough a publishing house. I would probably not be able to notice my own mistakes as well.

EDIT:

Then there is this other thing I have noticed. Often e-books will have UPDATED info. Like quotes before each chapter, that have been added after the prints of the paperbacks. That is good, but shouldn't those be provided at least to the people that have e-readers, but have bought the paperback? I know this would be too much to deal with but if I was the author I would make such small amounts of text, that are often taken from other authors (quotes) free, either trough a website, e-mail or something else.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by crdf

Now in this case, they will not have editors, ...

Anyway I can see some logic why a self-published book will have more errors then a book that has been sold trough a publishing house. I would probably not be able to notice my own mistakes as well.

Being self published doesn't have to mean no editing. Plenty of self-pub authors hire freelance editors or at least have peer groups where they try and edit each others work (which is sometimes more successful than other times).

but when a book sells to a publisher the cost is not only for the paper, and ink but for advertising of the book and edits. For those e-books that come from such a publishing houses I don't understand why they would be full wit mistakes. I would think they are using the same files that were edited?

eBooks that come from publishers only come from digital files for new releases. Publishers never kept digital files for books once they were printed until fairly recently or if they did it was a PDF copy. So all of those backlist titles are scanned and OCR'd in order to make them digital.



I guess for myself while I got some truly error ridden books in the 2007-2009ish time frame while publishers were more getting up to speed I don't notice anywhere near those kind of problems in the stuff I've gotten the past few years. Sure an occasional error, maybe a couple per book, but that's it.

[crdf]

Thank you for answering.

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

Being self published doesn't have to mean no editing. Plenty of self-pub authors hire freelance editors or at least have peer groups where they try and edit each others work (which is sometimes more successful than other times).

Of course. I wasn't trying to say that the quality is lower for self-published, but to point out differences.

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

eBooks that come from publishers only come from digital files for new releases. Publishers never kept digital files for books once they were printed until fairly recently or if they did it was a PDF copy. So all of those backlist titles are scanned and OCR'd in order to make them digital.

I hate the OCR scan but if a .pdf file is to my humble knowledge a publishing file that contains a lot of information, layers, fonts and printing presets. Of course I am not familiar with the book publishing industry, so thank you for the information.
I used to do OCR scanning few years back and it was really bad. Maybe it is from lack of a proper scanner but gosh the amount of editing required was stunning. You could actually sit and type it and get a better result. I hope it's not as difficult nowadays.

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

I guess for myself while I got some truly error ridden books in the 2007-2009ish time frame while publishers were more getting up to speed I don't notice anywhere near those kind of problems in the stuff I've gotten the past few years. Sure an occasional error, maybe a couple per book, but that's it.

I'm sure quality will be getting better. I think he most errors I've noticed from the free books provided trough Amazon. One of them was missing lines, it was like this message. Someone typed it and did not read after that even ones.

One think that worries me though is if I will be able to understand if there is a problem in the text. If it is a book you can see a page is missing or another printing error, but with an English book, and especially science fiction for me is more difficult. Sometimes the way authors write is confusing for me and I'm just wondering if the file is ok. I guess it is just insecurity from my lack of knowledge.

P.S. Beautiful cats.

[Calenorn]

Originally Posted by QuantumIguana

Is there really a difference in quality in the public domain books Amazon offers vs. what ManyBooks offers?

My experience has been with Barnes & Noble, but, yes. After a few unreadably bad OCR renderings, I gave up completely on the commercial site. If I know a work is public domain I don't even look at B&N.

Perhaps such things have improved there recently. I hope so.