How can publishers really suck so bad in formatting?

[jes1]

Originally Posted by Phogg

I'm pretty sure Bilbo still doesn't skewer Smeagol.

But he should have.....

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

And did HarperCollins ever respond that they've fixed the errors in The Hobbit yet?

No, and I don't think that my email has solved the problem. But I do think that if we all complain directly the publisher then water will wear away stone.

For what it is worth I told them that I would have been ashamed to put out over my name an ebook with so many errors.

Regards, Alex

[Teyrnon]

Hmm...How common are egregious formatting errors in ebooks? As I think about it I have the sinking feeling it's going to be awhile before the big publishers really start to care. Few, if any of their execs or employees probably use ebooks. This is new territory for them and I suspect most see it as a case of dump to a file, send file to whoever, and forget it.

[Abecedary]

Originally Posted by Teyrnon

Hmm...How common are egregious formatting errors in ebooks? As I think about it I have the sinking feeling it's going to be awhile before the big publishers really start to care. Few, if any of their execs or employees probably use ebooks. This is new territory for them and I suspect most see it as a case of dump to a file, send file to whoever, and forget it.

From what I can tell, sadly it seems to be fairly common. The copy of Anathem that I purchased from Sony has some strings of what should be small caps, but they're not set in small caps. Other parts of the book have the small caps set just fine, so it's pretty clear that someone/something missed these. The text was pretty much nonsensical as written without having the various quotes/engravings offset in some way. Thankfully it was only a few lines. When I checked out the PDF from my library to compare it suddenly made a lot more sense.

As others have mentioned elsewhere, some books don't have section breaks where they should (the paragraphs just run into each other), and there's the drop cap/initial cap issue mentioned here. Who knows what else is badly formatted out there, especially in books that actually use somewhat complex layout...

[sassanik]

Originally Posted by Abecedary

From what I can tell, sadly it seems to be fairly common. The copy of Anathem that I purchased from Sony has some strings of what should be small caps, but they're not set in small caps. Other parts of the book have the small caps set just fine, so it's pretty clear that someone/something missed these. The text was pretty much nonsensical as written without having the various quotes/engravings offset in some way. Thankfully it was only a few lines. When I checked out the PDF from my library to compare it suddenly made a lot more sense.

As others have mentioned elsewhere, some books don't have section breaks where they should (the paragraphs just run into each other), and there's the drop cap/initial cap issue mentioned here. Who knows what else is badly formatted out there, especially in books that actually use somewhat complex layout...

Yeah it has been my experience that ebooks frequently have formatting errors, not to mention spelling ones. It seems to me the smaller publishers are more serious about formating correctly, probably because they are smaller and a number of them sell primarily online.

Hopefully the big publishers will start taking ebook sales more seriously, but I think its going to take a while for them. They seem to be slow to react and mired in tradition of books out of tree's.

Amy

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Abecedary

As others have mentioned elsewhere, some books don't have section breaks where they should (the paragraphs just run into each other), and there's the drop cap/initial cap issue mentioned here. Who knows what else is badly formatted out there, especially in books that actually use somewhat complex layout...

I just read On Basilisk Station from Baen and it did have section breaks. But it also missed a number of section breaks. I'm just glad the missed breaks were fairly obvious.

[starrigger]

I'll just note that in many cases it's not the publisher that does the ebook formatting, but the retailer (Fictionwise, Sony, etc.)

In the recent release of my Ereads titles, Fictionwise really did not do a good job (from the samples I saw). Baen did a better job, but still not perfect. I don't know how Sony did, since they don't send copies to the authors. Kindle yet to be seen. (Baen is the only one that actually made copies available to me.)

They all started with the same RTF files.

[ShellShock]

Fictionwise in the past have always refunded the cost of the ebook when I have complained about things like this. The last problem I had was with "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson, which appeared to be missing the final few chapters. In fact they were still there, but you could not reach them when paging through, although they were accessible from the table of contents.

[texasnightowl]

Originally Posted by ShellShock

Fictionwise in the past have always refunded the cost of the ebook when I have complained about things like this. The last problem I had was with "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson, which appeared to be missing the final few chapters. In fact they were still there, but you could not reach them when paging through, although they were accessible from the table of contents.

Oooh...interesting to know since that is on my wish list.

FWIW, Fictionwise has not yet responded to my report to them Sunday night.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by ShellShock

Fictionwise in the past have always refunded the cost of the ebook when I have complained about things like this. The last problem I had was with "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson, which appeared to be missing the final few chapters. In fact they were still there, but you could not reach them when paging through, although they were accessible from the table of contents.

It's actually a clever ebook pun: the title says '..Nearly Everything', and you are in fact able to read...nearly everything.

It would be interesting to know how they managed to do that. For example, if it is not just caused by random corruption, it could be used to package a collection of independent works, each of which has its own beginning and ending. The last page of each could have a link to take you back to a table of contents. Or maybe you could include 'hidden' or 'easter egg' material accessible only if you use 'goto #' navigation.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by tomsem

It would be interesting to know how they managed to do that. For example, if it is not just caused by random corruption, it could be used to package a collection of independent works, each of which has its own beginning and ending. The last page of each could have a link to take you back to a table of contents. Or maybe you could include 'hidden' or 'easter egg' material accessible only if you use 'goto #' navigation.

In mobipocket you can add a 'crossable="no"' property to a pagebreak, which should have that behaviour. It can be usefull for separating end notes from the main text, for instance.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by starrigger

I'll just note that in many cases it's not the publisher that does the ebook formatting, but the retailer (Fictionwise, Sony, etc.)

It's generally whoever is the distributor (which would be FW for their Multiformat books). I know Hachette (Orbit, Grand Central, Etc.) provides distributors (ebooks.com, LightningSource, OverDrive) with an ePub file and the distro's take it from there. It depends on the error and where it occurs to know who's to blame.

Still it's ultimately the publishers product and you'd think they'd want the oversight of approving the final files (like they look at a proof before going to press for a print product).

[GeoffC]

of course it's not a new problem is it?
i'm currently reading in paper form "Confessor" the last in the Sword of Truth series and that had numerous mistakes in spelling....

[llasram]

Originally Posted by GeoffC

of course it's not a new problem is it?
i'm currently reading in paper form "Confessor" the last in the Sword of Truth series and that had numerous mistakes in spelling....

But I think we can agree that less attention is paid to e-book editions. I've been think about this, and I think there are three problems:

• Especially for older books, publishers do not always have on hand digital copies of the final, fully edited text used to typeset the print edition. They use OCR to extract the final text from the print edition, but do not allocate the budget for fully proofing that text and/or do not have sufficient experience proofing OCRed text. (If you've ever contributed to the Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders program, you know that many of the errors OCR systems make are quite different from human typographical errors.)
• Not all publishers have or are willing to invest in having the knowledge necessary to create electronic editions of texts in-house. In order to produce electronic editions anyway, these publishers will contract out e-book production to a third party. Some of these companies are quite good -- most of the Overdrive-produced book I've purchased have been very well-formatted -- and others not, but either way the additional distance means that publishers do not always have the direct overview of quality control they have with the print editions they produce themselves. I hypothesize that this is especially bad at the moment as publishers are mass-moving their catalogs into e-book format, making it especially difficult to individually review each title.
• The existing state of e-book viewers and production tools suboptimal. Markup which causes the ReaderWorks LIT-generation tool to produce a decent-looking LIT book can create a complete mess when used with Mobipocket Creator to produce a Mobipocket book. Even within just the Mobipocket format, renderer differences can result in books which look perfect on one platform but terrible on another. This is somewhat similar to the days of the Web browser wars, only many of the renderers in question are on embedded devices, making them more difficult to update.

Anyway, that's my 0.02 USD.

[JasonB]

Originally Posted by Abecedary

The copy of Anathem that I purchased from Sony has some strings of what should be small caps, but they're not set in small caps.

I finished reading that a little while ago. I didn't notice a small caps problem (I may have just missed it) but I did notice that there were a few places where it looked like there were supposed to be footnotes. (I.e. a superscripted asterisk after a sentence.) I know that Stephenson has used footnotes in some of his other books, particularly the Baroque Cycle, so I was suspicious that he actually had used footnotes in Anathem also - but that the electronic version was simply missing them altogether. (I don't know how footnotes - as opposed to endnotes - could be applied to an electronic book, but surely they should go somewhere rather than simply being absent altogether.)

On a related note, I've read several electronic books now that:

1. Have mis-spelled words. These don't even exist in the English language. And they are repeated. So, it's obvious that a physical book was scanned in and mistakes were generated via OCR software. But, after this was done, the result wasn't even run through a spell check!

2. French words with accents that use uppercase letters rather than lowercase. So, for instance, instead of é you get É.