Poor editing?

[thibaulthalpern]

DaleDe, I'm not sure "very large digital version" necessarily means that the version is an image. I have an Adobe Digital Edition version of the book African History: A Very Short Introduction which I legitimately bought. That book is about 8.3MB which is fairly large for a small book (as the subtitle suggests). I can imagine regular academic books taking up more megabytes.

I'm not sure what you mean by lack of source control of the author's documents. When talking about academic publishing, we submit our electronic versions to the publisher and that's it. So they do have some kind of electronic version that the author submitted. I doubt that many authors these day submit paper versions of their books to publishers.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by thibaulthalpern

DaleDe, I'm not sure "very large digital version" necessarily means that the version is an image. I have an Adobe Digital Edition version of the book African History: A Very Short Introduction which I legitimately bought. That book is about 8.3MB which is fairly large for a small book (as the subtitle suggests). I can imagine regular academic books taking up more megabytes.

I'm not sure what you mean by lack of source control of the author's documents. When talking about academic publishing, we submit our electronic versions to the publisher and that's it. So they do have some kind of electronic version that the author submitted. I doubt that many authors these day submit paper versions of their books to publishers.

But why would not need a very large digital version for every book to produce the AZW format. I understand that some eBooks are large due to images or exceptional content but that doesn't have anything to do with the Amazon answer to the question of why there are errors in the book unless you believe images cause more conversion errors.

Dale

[thibaulthalpern]

I believe that converting from one electronic format to another causes problems. In a recent discussion on this forum, one of the authors mentioned that each time he converts from say for example ePub to Mobi, he or someone else has to proofread the entire document again because in the process of electronic conversion, typographical, typesetting, and other errors occur.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by thibaulthalpern

I believe that converting from one electronic format to another causes problems. In a recent discussion on this forum, one of the authors mentioned that each time he converts from say for example ePub to Mobi, he or someone else has to proofread the entire document again because in the process of electronic conversion, typographical, typesetting, and other errors occur.

The worst conversion is from PDF to anything else. There will always be errors.

That said, I've converted from ePub, LIT, Mobipocket, and eReader (god awful crap of a format) without too much hassle (except for eReader). The problem is if you have a poorly made source. Sometimes you can get away with a poor source since the reader isn't too strict.

[susan_cassidy]

Given the apparent lack of accuracy in OCRing text, I don't understand why publishers think they don't have to proof stuff. I've seen all kinds of run-together words, words split in two, chunks of text repeated, names misinterpreted (e.g. V/aarid instead of Waarid). These kinds of errors drive me crazy.

[dmaul1114]

I have seen more errors with words ran together etc. in ebooks (both bought and free) than I have in print books).

Doesn't bother me as it's only been a few instance per book and I've not had one yet that was full of typos.

[poohbear_nc]

I've had the worst experience when purchasing Kindle books created by Mobilereference for Amazon. In one case, all the apostrophes had been replaced in the text with question marks. Quite a reading experience.

I emailed Mobilereference directly (as I've become somewhat addicted to their collected works of... publications), and they responded that formatting for the Kindle has been the most difficult and most problematic - and that they really weren't devoting that much time to it. They also didn't want any reader feedback as to which texts needed to be re-edited for readability.

[thibaulthalpern]

Originally Posted by dmaul1114

I have seen more errors with words ran together etc. in ebooks (both bought and free) than I have in print books).

Doesn't bother me as it's only been a few instance per book and I've not had one yet that was full of typos.

yeah, me too. In print books, I rarely notice mistakes. On ebooks, I've seen quite a bit!

[kwjones]

I'll bet E.E. Cummings would be a challenge for anyone to convert.

[Amalthia]

I convert a lot of fan fiction into LRF and even with the word doc I have to convert that to HTML (using Word97 seems to give the best output) I still have to go in and check to make sure the Table of Contents links work, add page breaks after chapters make sure the chapters are centered...and even after all that once the file is created I have to go in and check to make sure the links really do work (sometimes they work in the browser but not in the LRF file) and yeah it's some amount of work and I just discovered in half my conversions sometimes the italics are not showing because the html had < i > < p > instead of < p > < i >

I tried using the newer word programs to convert to html (thinking the code would have correct tags) but it just doesn't work as well as the Microsoft Word 97. The good news is at least with Word 97 I can read the HTML and use replace all to fix things.

So basically, yeah I can see how "professional" novels would have not only typos but all sorts of formatting errors. I'm fixing shorter works but some of the fan fiction stories are novel length and at least I'm starting off with a clean electronic version.

[dmaul1114]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

They also didn't want any reader feedback as to which texts needed to be re-edited for readability.

They shouldn't need reader feedback as the books should be edited for readability before being put on the market!

[cerement]

Originally Posted by thibaulthalpern

I believe that converting from one electronic format to another causes problems. In a recent discussion on this forum, one of the authors mentioned that each time he converts from say for example ePub to Mobi, he or someone else has to proofread the entire document again because in the process of electronic conversion, typographical, typesetting, and other errors occur.

This is why I'm looking for what would be suitable as a "master format". The XHTML component of ePub is not rigid enough. The DTBook component looks better (and easier to validate as XML). TEI is used more often in humanities, and DITA offers non-linear flexibility.

But a "master format" is going to have to be relatively rigid in its makeup because the purpose of a so-called "master format" would be to prevent or minimize these errors. Even something as simple as

<span class="dropcap">M</span>obileread

can cause problems by breaking searches for "mobileread" (even though it's not supposed to).

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

But why would not need a very large digital version for every book to produce the AZW format. I understand that some eBooks are large due to images or exceptional content but that doesn't have anything to do with the Amazon answer to the question of why there are errors in the book unless you believe images cause more conversion errors.

Dale

Amazon is simply saying that their conversion process (which can be from multiple formats, including Word, Mobi, etc, to their Mobi/AZW files--I suspect even Mobi files are re-converted through their system) can result in typos and formatting errors caused by glitches during upload--in other words, their data transfer isn't perfect. And finally, they leave it up to the author to check his material once it's up for proper formatting and display, page by page as required. This was my experience when I had books in the Kindle system.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Amazon is simply saying that their conversion process (which can be from multiple formats, including Word, Mobi, etc, to their Mobi/AZW files--I suspect even Mobi files are re-converted through their system) can result in typos and formatting errors caused by glitches during upload--in other words, their data transfer isn't perfect. And finally, they leave it up to the author to check his material once it's up for proper formatting and display, page by page as required. This was my experience when I had books in the Kindle system.

Well, perhaps although digital transfers are mostly glitch free and I doubt if they have any in their 200K eBooks. Typos should not creep in at all and formatting errors are possible as are characters not in their final character set but why would that say the use a very large version of the source file? The source file need not be particular large for text transfers. I doubt they leave it up to the author to proof his eBooks if they get them commercially from a publisher. I would believe that they do no proofing themselves.

Dale

[thibaulthalpern]

Originally Posted by Amalthia

[...]
So basically, yeah I can see how "professional" novels would have not only typos but all sorts of formatting errors. I'm fixing shorter works but some of the fan fiction stories are novel length and at least I'm starting off with a clean electronic version.

Very helpful information there, Amalthia! So it does prove again that conversion from one electronic format to another is not as simple as executing one command.

For the first few days I had my PRS-700, I wondered if I made the wrong purchase. I don't mean if I made a mistake in buy the particular model of PRS-700 but whether it was a mistake to have bought a ebook device at all. I was disappointed in the quality of the ebooks even those sold by professionals like Amazon. To me, reading a book isn't just about text but it's also the typesetting that needs to be pleasant, etc. If I wanted to read text with lots of mistake and look unprofessional, all I need to do is turn to some of my students' papers and look at what they've written. I don't need that in an ebook.

Anyhow, I eventually realised that it wasn't a bad decision to have purchased the PRS-700, especially since I have PDFs of academic journal articles (which by the way are all tip top shape regarding no spelling errors and so forth, and I've been printing academic journal PDFs for years now).