Spoiled Kindle experience: too much sloppy content

[elemenoP]

About formatting issues: I recently switched from a Sony reader to a Kindle, and I'm MUCH MUCH happier with the formatting. It seems that epub gives a lot more control over formatting... which is both a blessing and a curse and after several years I have decided it's more a curse than a blessing. I never knew what a book was going to look like on my Sony reader until after I loaded it. Even after doing my own custom conversions in Calibre, for which I wrote my own CSS, loaded my own fonts, etc, sometimes the book didn't look right. Of the books I have read on the Kindle over the last few months, they all look THE SAME, both sideloaded books and books purchased from Amazon. That's not to say that the formatting is exactly as I would want it, but it's good enough and I no longer want to spend any time formatting ebooks. I let Amazon do it for me and I'm satisfied.

As for typos, I mostly read new releases and I sometimes notice typos but not too many. When I read a public domain book, I would certainly look for a high-quality source such as the MR library or B&N's classics series. I would not get them from Amazon or Gutenberg.

eP

[MovieBird]

Originally Posted by jgaiser

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.

Almost every single one of my purchased eBooks has annoying errors. I'm rereading The Lord of the Rings, and the excessive paragraph breaks in the middle of a sentence are annoying. I haven't looked to see if A Dance with Dragons was ever fixed, but when it came out the formatting was an absolute pile of steaming muffin, and these were issues specific to the eBook edition. I'm no longer willing to spend over $3 for an eBook precisely because of the piss poor quality control.

[jgaiser]

Originally Posted by MovieBird

Almost every single one of my purchased eBooks has annoying errors. I'm rereading The Lord of the Rings, and the excessive paragraph breaks in the middle of a sentence are annoying. I haven't looked to see if A Dance with Dragons was ever fixed, but when it came out the formatting was an absolute pile of steaming muffin, and these were issues specific to the eBook edition. I'm no longer willing to spend over $3 for an eBook precisely because of the piss poor quality control.

Interesting, I own both and have yet to run into any obvious (to me) formatting problems. Maybe I'm just easy to please.

In fact, I've just gone back and stepped through the first five chapters of both books (epub) and saw no glaring, obvious format problems (i.e. paragraph breaks in the middle of sentences).

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by jgaiser

Interesting, I own both and have yet to run into any obvious (to me) formatting problems. Maybe I'm just easy to please.

In fact, I've just gone back and stepped through the first five chapters of both books (epub) and saw no glaring, obvious format problems (i.e. paragraph breaks in the middle of sentences).

My copies are OK too.

[vxf]

Originally Posted by MovieBird

I haven't looked to see if A Dance with Dragons was ever fixed, but when it came out the formatting was an absolute pile of steaming muffin, and these were issues specific to the eBook edition.

I am terribly annoyed by poor formatting and typos in ebooks - and I struggle to understand how experiences seem to vary so much. Almost all ebooks I buy have problems - some more glaring than others. Yet, quality control is terribly low, compared to printed books.

Which gets me to the above... A Dance with Dragons. A new book - and a big title, at that, with huge sales. And ridiculously bad formatting. Paragraph breaks in dialogue were missing so often that it frequently became hard to try to track which character was speaking.

I, for one, think this is becoming a huge issue. And it's not just books. I get the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times on my Kindle as well (previously, I had SONY subscriptions for both). It's a horror-show. Typos, missing spaces, poor formatting, pictures and tables associated with the wrong articles, table of contents linked to the wrong articles... it's such a sloppy job. I try to ignore it, but it does irk me, especially after paying over $24 a month for the WSJ.

[Difflugia]

Originally Posted by jswinden

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.

Though I'm sure this is true to a degree (and more true for some publishers than others), I don't think it's primarily the fault of the publishers. When I use HTML/CSS the way I would for a browser, different ebook readers and software don't render the result correctly and consistently. If I want the ebook to look presentable with multiple devices and apps, I end up having to target the least common denominator and change things like <h1> to <p class='heading1'> just to make sure that results are consistent across multiple platforms. I actually have a set of search-and-replace macros so I don't have to write the source like that, but can wait until after I'm done to dumb it down.

Originally Posted by Difflugia

Though I'm sure this is true to a degree (and more true for some publishers than others), I don't think it's primarily the fault of the publishers. When I use HTML/CSS the way I would for a browser, different ebook readers and software don't render the result correctly and consistently. If I want the ebook to look presentable with multiple devices and apps, I end up having to target the least common denominator and change things like <h1> to <p class='heading1'> just to make sure that results are consistent across multiple platforms. I actually have a set of search-and-replace macros so I don't have to write the source like that, but can wait until after I'm done to dumb it down.

Perhaps this is an indication that the focus should be on the structure of the book, rather than the formatting of the book. That seems like a reasonable proposition for a lot of the linear texts out there.

[Zora]

Addendum re Project Gutenberg texts: the oldest ebooks are full of errors. Once Distributed Proofreaders started contributing most of the books, quality went up. DP then changed the workflow to add more proofing and formatting rounds, and quality went up again. The latest DP books are as good as, or better than, recent commercial ebooks.

PG *still* requires DP to submit files as text files as well as HTML files. The text files are outdated and completely useless, lacking support for italic, bold, small caps, etc., but I gather that Manybooks still creates its ebook versions from the text files, which leads to preventable errors.

I do not have the energy for this at the moment, but I hope to convince DP to move to producing epubs, which can then be converted to Kindle formats (mobi, azw) with Calibre.

[Geralt]

Been using Kindle Keyboard for over a year, and honestly I have no idea what OP is talking about. I've read just about everything on it except maybe children's books. That includes novels, manga, comics...never had any problem.

[artig]

A few months ago I purchased an ebook novel published by a Penguin subsidiary. The formatting, spelling, and grammar were so bad it completely spoiled the reading experience. The author's email address was published in the book, so I wrote to him about it. He knew all about the problems, and was definitely not a happy chappy. Apparently an early rough draft had been published instead of the final approved version. And it took months before the correct version made its way through the system.

On average there was more than one error on every page, and not just formatting errors. There were question marks at the end of sentences which were not questions, missing apostrophes, incorrect apostrophes, spelling errors, homonym errors ("the souls of his feet" was a good one), and grammatical errors.

I haven't bothered to download the book again to check if the faults have been fixed, since I don't intend to re-read it.

That was one of the worst examples I've seen, although a recent download of another book is even worse. Most of the other books I've read have only had occasional spelling errors, but numerous formatting errors. About 90% are non-fiction books.

[TCSimpson]

Someone mentioned different uses of HTML tags like <span> etc, and said it was bad formatting. One thing that should be understood is that some of this stuff is DEVICE dependent. Different devices may render the exact same formatting in different ways.

Let's address <span> specifically.

This was due to an IPad/Ibooks issues. An old bug that I don't know if they ever fixed.
Apparently there is/was a problem with ibooks or iPads ignoring certain aspects of html formatting-such as centered text for instance. The way to overcome the problem was by using span tags.

What it means is that generally a publisher SHOULD make a separate coded file for EACH store/distributor. But that doesn't normally happen. More often than not it's one epub file and one mobi file. The tags/formatting that applies to each device is often included in the code. However, at times, this might cause issues, and you may see the resulting problems.

This then goes back to the whole different device aspect. Think about how many different types of readers, phones, tablets etc are out there. Imagine if a publisher had to code for each individual device in a separate file. Through the roof expenses.
Also the tech is constantly changing and one has to adjust and learn unlike with print, it's just one format. Typography.

This doesn't excuse typos etc, but sometimes the paragraph, space issues, etc that you might see are results of the different devices and what's churned out in the process of making one compatible file that a publisher would upload to all the epub accepting stores, and then another for mobi. Hence why the experiences differ so much.

[wizwor]

It costs money to edit a book. It costs more to edit a book properly. Graphic artists are not free. Good ones are expensive. If people are willing to fund the collaboration of a team of editors, writers, and artists for a book, teams of editors, writers, and artists will line up to create works of art. As long as people insist on damn-near-free books, there will be compromises -- especially in the special interest areas where volumes are low.

[faithbw]

The majority of e-books I have purchased have had good formatting. There have been a handful that had pretty bad formatting. I still read them but I admit it was annoying. It's not just indie books either. Even some books from professional publishers have had bad formatting. Of course, this issue does not seem to occur in printed books. The one exception being an independently published book I borrowed from the library recently.

Typos do seem more common in e-books. I could probably count on one hand and have fingers left over the number of p-books with typos that I've read. To be fair, the e-books with typos don't have many (more like one-three) so it doesn't bother me.

It just feels like publishers still take much more care with p-books and expect readers of e-books to put up with books that apparently have less care put into them.

[kevinp]

Originally Posted by wizwor

It costs money to edit a book. It costs more to edit a book properly. Graphic artists are not free. Good ones are expensive. If people are willing to fund the collaboration of a team of editors, writers, and artists for a book, teams of editors, writers, and artists will line up to create works of art. As long as people insist on damn-near-free books, there will be compromises -- especially in the special interest areas where volumes are low.

Graphic artists usually work in advertising and are the ones that come up with logos and posters, etc., but I get your point.

I would assume that most writers these days are using some sort of word processing program and not an old typewriter. Based on that, how hard it is to format a Word or Word Perfect document? Obviously, this isn't the case for old OCR'd books, but the newer stuff should at least have better formatting/spelling/punctuation.

I'm not asking for "damn-near-free books", but when the ebook costs more than the printed version, there's no excuse for that. (Again, talking about newer books)

[wizwor]

When I get up in the morning, I turn on the news to keep me company as I prepare for work. The anchors repeat the same stories from 5:00 am to 7:00 am. The words are put on paper by a professional writer, checked by an editor, and delivered by educated anchors in front of an army of producers. Despite that, I am assailed by a barrage of pronunciation and grammar errors every single morning. When I get to work, I thumb through a paper or two. Again, error after error after error. Clearly, Microsoft has not properly communicated the meaning of those squiggly lines.

I think the problem is that the writers are not writing with Word. I publish a monthly newsletter. The software I use does not spell check -- at least not effectively. I drop the whole newsletter into word to check for errors.

I don't think most would do this.