Errors due to format conversion - publisher's responsibility?

[flipreads]

Originally Posted by anamardoll

I haven't figured out how to put in a Paypal store yet. I do have a donate button, but having said that, several of my readers are from countries and situations that don't support Paypal, so there's that.

(If anyone sells through their site with something other than Paypal, I'd be interested to hear alternatives.)

Our retail store, Flipreads, supports other payment methods (I'm from the Philippines and here, neither PayPal or credit cards are as common as the US, so we're interested in alternative methods of payment). (However, this also means that orders aren't automated or immediate as Amazon or PayPal... an actual human actually processes the transaction and we have weekends off.)

These sites (1, 2) also list alternatives to PayPal (and with PayPal's ban against erotica fiction, some authors might want to look into them if they're writing in that genre).

[flipreads]

Just want to clarify some things:

JSWolf: Many authors don't have the final, edited version of their manuscript in a word processing file. They might have proofs (electronic or otherwise) where they last made their corrections. Few, if any, actually input their corrections into their *insert favored word processor file here*.

If you're a publisher (or anthology editor, in the case of short stories) looking to reprint a book, the best alternative really is to OCR the document and check for scanning errors.

Anemik Oak: They might have availed of Kobo's conversion service.

Avantman: Another problem of Big Publishers when checking their books is the sheer quantity they release. And then they'll have to do it for every store. Hence they depend on the conversion company to do the actual proofing, pre-submission to the various retailers (after it's submitted to the retailers, that's out of the conversion company's hands). However, you get what you pay for: some conversion companies actually proof their documents, others don't (and some mishaps are due to the retailer, as Anamardoll pointed out).

Anamardoll: what genre do you write in? If it's science fiction/fantasy, you can try submitting to Wizard's Tower Books and Weightless Books. You can submit the file you want.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by flipreads

Anemik Oak: They might have availed of Kobo's conversion service.

No, they didn't. These are epubs from a major publisher that Kobo screwed with after the publisher sent them.

[ProDigit]

The publisher is only responsible for the content he delivers.
If after a personal conversion (or the free conversion Amazon offers) errors occurs, it's not the publisher's fault.

Among the many things that are happening these days, is calibre, a great program to convert books, but it's auto feat is about the same as amazon.
Namely automatic conversion still prone to errors.

I always find it best to convert books to html0, manually edit the html for errors, before reconverting. This would reduce errors considerably, and allows you to manually edit the conversions.

Amazon converts for free, they don't charge for it, so they won't be held responsible.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ProDigit

Among the many things that are happening these days, is calibre, a great program to convert books, but it's auto feat is about the same as amazon. Namely automatic conversion still prone to errors.

Converting ePub > Mobi or Mobi > ePub, I have never personally or even read about any textual errors because of the conversion. The only issues are due to the codepage being wrong. But that's usually to do with eReader format. Sure, sometimes the formatting can be a bit off after the conversion, but the text is fine as far as the input format goes.

[ProDigit]

yes, text conversions are working fine, however, layout issues, hyperlink / toc / chapter link / footnote link issues, wrong title formatting happens quite frequently (not to mention a situation I frequently get on my jetbook mini, where the last word of a line, ends up as a single word on the next line).
Makes reading an absolute pain on the small 5" screen.

[MrsJoseph]

Originally Posted by anamardoll

I wrote my book in Sigil for a clean ePUB. But it's annoying to me that only B&N will take it. Amazon's conversion tool is not very good if you have PNG images (the transparent parts go black), and while Calibre met my needs picture-wise, there's simply no way (that I could find) to tweak the final output manually. Frustrating!

I'm paying 52 Novels (JA Konrath's formatter) to take my ePUB and get me a word doc that I can upload to Smashwords because I want a "perfect" conversion (i.e., I want the Smashwords ePUB to match my initial PUB exactly), but even 52 Novels can't promise me that -- they can just promise close enough.

52 Novels is also doing my CreateSpace word doc because they have their OWN conversion process. At least in the case of CreateSpace, since it's a physical book, that makes a modicum of sense. *sigh*

Feedbooks actually expects you to write your novel (or copy and paste it) into their web browser directly. No. Just... no.

O_o

You should be kidding.

Calibre should make a (paid?) upgrade function for author tools...it would probably put the rest of these conversion companies out of business...

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ProDigit

yes, text conversions are working fine, however, layout issues, hyperlink / toc / chapter link / footnote link issues, wrong title formatting happens quite frequently (not to mention a situation I frequently get on my jetbook mini, where the last word of a line, ends up as a single word on the next line).
Makes reading an absolute pain on the small 5" screen.

Garbage in, garbage out. If the source file has the correct data in the correct places or Calibre is told what the correct data is, then you get a good conversion as far as the data goes.

As for your JBM, it sounds like a bug in the reader app. I've never had such an issue with any of the Sony readers or iBooks on the iPad.

[ProDigit]

indeed, the Jetbook Mini is recognized as a regular Jetbook (as the mini is currently not supported yet, probably the reason; though Ectaco does give a manual saying that you need Bookdesigner or Calibre to convert books to the FB2 format).
They don't provide the software, but seemingly the web software does not even support the mini (didn't try bookdesigner though).

[theducks]

Originally Posted by ProDigit

yes, text conversions are working fine, however, layout issues, hyperlink / toc / chapter link / footnote link issues, wrong title formatting happens quite frequently (not to mention a situation I frequently get on my jetbook mini, where the last word of a line, ends up as a single word on the next line).
Makes reading an absolute pain on the small 5" screen.

Someone forgot to set Widows and Orphans values.

Padding (what a cold or hot typesetter would do) only works for fixed page sizes.

[grumbles]

If the publisher isn't responsible, then who is?

I have just finished reading "Too Many Cooks" and the quality of this book is just simply crap. It was probably scanned and OCR'd and it appears that no real effort was made to proof read the book. "I'll" appears as "Ill" all the way through the book. Opening single quotes are lost at random, making it confusing to follow at times.

There is a section that is supposed to represent a menu, the text is centered but nobody actually tried to read it or they would have put in line breaks so that it actually makes sense.

It would appear that books are being thrown together with as little effort as possible and any errors are then blamed on "technical" or "computer" or "formatting" problems. With a modest amount of effort (like maybe actually reading the resulting conversion) most of these problems could be eliminated. There is no excuse for typos in any ebook. Most layout problems could be solved with a little thought. There are edge cases where not knowing the resulting page size can yield strange results but those should be very rare (at least for most fiction books.)

It;s not as if I am not familiar with the process of scanning a book and creating a layout for an ebook. As an ongoing project I have been scanning and creating ebooks of a a lead, out of print but still under copyright author. I know what's involved and I also know that I can make a book without typos and a a readable format. If I can do, then any publisher can. If they won't, then they shouldn't be charging money for their product.

Fortunately for me, I got "too Many Cooks" from the library. I would be really pissed if I had paid for it.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by theducks

Someone forgot to set Widows and Orphans values.

I turn them off. I don't like them.

[avantman42]

Originally Posted by grumbles

If the publisher isn't responsible, then who is?

There is an argument (made above) that if the format conversion is done by the retailer, then the retailer is responsible. I'm inclined to think that in such a case, the retailer bears some responsibility, but I also think the publisher has a responsibility to provide a good source file. I'd prefer the retailers not to do any conversion, though.

Originally Posted by grumbles

I have just finished reading "Too Many Cooks" and the quality of this book is just simply crap. It was probably scanned and OCR'd and it appears that no real effort was made to proof read the book.

I've read books that have been OCR'd, and which have had errors that should have been picked up during a proof-read. There's no excuse for it.

[poker467]

There are always going to be some errors in a conversion. If you start from an html document you can get as picky as you would like and eventually produce a near mirror image of your original book. Of course this takes some time, but that's because it works.

I haven't found a problem that can't be handled with notepad++ and calibre.