Next chapter in the saga of poor ebook formatting

[murg]

Originally Posted by Joques

Murg, that doesn't bother me for some reason. I guess most scene breaks are naturally distinguishable by the context, and the act of turning the page in itself is a good enough cue for me that I just detect the scene break and get on with my reading. YMMV. I can't see me ever going into my books and inserting dashes or asterisks at every scene break - that would be a huge job!

I find it annoying that be in the middle of a paragraph and realise that the scene has broken.

[dickloraine]

But css does not have to be only formatting. Classes like "chapter-first", "new-scene", "quote", "poem" etc. do add meaning to a paragraph. One can use classes semantically, indeed I would say that is how they should be used. Of course I have nothing against more obvious scene breaks, but css is a legitimate place to do it.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by murg

In a physical book, scene breaks are delineated by a wide band of empty space. Unless they occur at the top or bottom of a page, in which case they are usually represented by three asterisks (or similar character).

I have actually never seen that method. Do you have an example title?

I have never seen a book using space and some symbols for the same thing. To me that just seems to be bad typography.

[cadele]

Originally Posted by murg

I find it annoying that be in the middle of a paragraph and realise that the scene has broken.

+1. I find it very jarring and much prefer some visual cue. I don't mind either white space or asterisks or some other little curlicue but I need something.

[mgbino]

Originally Posted by cadele

+1. I find it very jarring and much prefer some visual cue. I don't mind either white space or asterisks or some other little curlicue but I need something.

I'm okay if a release of an obscure back catalogue book has a few mistakes here and there... I can deal with one or two OCR errors or a missing scene break here and there. My problem is when there has obviously been little to no effort to correct any mistakes. Like I said in a previous post, Deathstalker is missing EVERY scene break in the book. Deathstalker Rebellion is missing about 1/4 of a page of text. That's unacceptable.

[murg]

Originally Posted by tompe

I have actually never seen that method. Do you have an example title?

I have never seen a book using space and some symbols for the same thing. To me that just seems to be bad typography.

I don't have an example, finding one in a currently available book isn't easy, because I don't have too many current physical books.

The reason the book designers do this is that a scene at the top or bottom of a page will get lost, as there is no previous or following paragraph.

When books get scanned, the publishers leave the existing asterisks in, but use spacing to delineate middle of the physical page scene breaks. This is why you'll get occasional sets of asterisks in scanned commercial books.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by tompe

I have actually never seen that method. Do you have an example title?

I have never seen a book using space and some symbols for the same thing. To me that just seems to be bad typography.

One example is "The Lord of the Rings", Tommy. Blank space for a scene break in the middle of the page; asterisks for a scene break at the bottom of the page.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

One example is "The Lord of the Rings", Tommy. Blank space for a scene break in the middle of the page; asterisks for a scene break at the bottom of the page.

Are you sure it is not different kind of breaks? Like scene breaks and section breaks? I have always read breaks using asterisks as stronger than the ones using only space if both occur in the same book.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by tompe

Are you sure it is not different kind of breaks? Like scene breaks and section breaks? I have always read breaks using asterisks as stronger than the ones using only space if both occur in the same book.

Absolutely certain . The only time it has "***" scene breaks is when the break occurs at the bottom of a page. Everywhere else, a break is indicated by a blank line. This is in my 3-volume hardback illustrated edition.

I'll try to take a couple of photographs later today to show you.

[DiapDealer]

This is exactly why the terms "incorrect" or "error" aren't really appropriate when talking about ebook formatting. There's never been one typographic "standard" that book makers strictly adhered to--even before ebooks. Nor did the few that were widely practiced never change over the years. The "no-indent" after breaks (or on first paragraphs) rule has never been carved in stone; and neither has the treatment of different types of breaks (clearly). The only thing that has made many of these things "wrong" in ebooks is the end-user's ability to alter them. Without that, people would just read it. Like they did with print books.

How many discussions can you honestly say you had about scene- section-break handling (or the spacing after chapter headers) in printed book typography before ebooks? Probably none (unless you were/are a typesetter). I can guarantee it wasn't because there weren't differences of opinion on the subject, and different practices being applied (and still are). It was because as the reader ... your opinion simply didn't matter (and you couldn't easily do anything about it even if you did care).

There were no Arm-Chair Typographers before ebooks. Now suddenly everyone that buys an ebook is one.

[dickloraine]

But there is a defacto style for print books. 99% of my hundreds of print books indent normal paragraphs and don't do this for scene breaks and the beginning of a chapter. At least how a print book looks from afar seems to me standard (so to say the styling of a book). On the typesetting side of things, there could be differences, but I don't look for these. Only ebooks have for example often large spaces between each paragraph (maybe this comes from the web). Ebooks often are very different on the layout, something print books just weren't and I can't understand why. Typesetting on the other hand is just not there in ebooks apart from how the reader renders the text.
I think the fact that there is no defacto standard for ebooks leads to many complains. One just doesn't know how an ebook will look, before opening it. But I definitely know how the next print book I open will look.

[HarryT]

Managed to find a single page which has both types of scene breaks: there are two "space" scene breaks on the left-hand page, and a "bottom of the page asterisks" break on the right-hand page.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by dickloraine

But there is a defacto style for print books. 99% of my hundreds of print books indent normal paragraphs and don't do this for scene breaks and the beginning of a chapter.

Interestingly, if you look at my photograph of a page from LOTR in my previous message, you'll see that the publisher of this particular book has chosen to use a normal paragraph indentation after a scene break.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by dickloraine

99% of my hundreds of print books indent normal paragraphs and don't do this for scene breaks and the beginning of a chapter.

I hereby challenge your 99%. The very first mass market paper-pack I grabbed off of my shelf at random indents all first paragraphs: first chapter para and first para after breaks (mostly block-quotes). In fact, now that I look at it. I find the indent to be rather tiny and insufficient for my preferences if I read it today. I don't remember having any hangups/concerns/complaints about its clearly aberrant typography when I read it years ago. Not because it was different from the mostly imaginary "standard" of print book typography, but because it simply didn't matter.

EDIT: Third book indents after scene-breaks but doesn't indent opening chapter paragraphs.
EDIT2: fifth book I grabbed had ridiculously large line-spacing (I don't remember it tripping me up at the time).
EDIT3: sixth book used images for some scene-breaks in the middle of a page (no indent) and some breaks had no image (also in the middle of the page). No indication that one break was "harder" than any other from the context.
EDIT4: seventh book has a huuuuge indent for the first paragraph in every chapter; a "normal" indent for subsequent paragraphs.

... and another that indents every single paragraph no matter where it occurs.

The books I pointed out were copyrighted 1972 - 1998; published by DelRey, Bantam, Tor, etc...

I came across one book where the justification created rivers of whitespace between words that would make the world's-worst non-hyphenating ebook rendering system's justification algorithm look fantastic by comparison.

Typos; missing text; words that should be italicized, but aren't; block-quotes that are indistinguishable from normal text ... these are mistakes that can (and should) be pointed at as "wrong" or a "mistake." Paragraph indents (or non-), scene-break handling, line-spacing, margins (esp new-chapter margin-top), fonts--these are things that have never been standardized in print ... no matter how hard someone wants to believe they were. Variations and personal preferences have always held sway in those areas.

[Little.Egret]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The thing to do is before you complain about how bad an eBook is, make sure you've downloaded the latest version. Go back to the store you bought it from and download it again. eBooks get updated and we don't get notified. The only way to get the latest version is to download the eBook again. I'm not saying all eBooks get updated, but many do.

This doesn't always work.
I have 'auto update' set in my Amazon library profile and updates normally come through fine but I noticed on the web page for one book that it was claimed to be updated (and had a new cover). Same ASIN and warning about previously purchased
I did a 'remove from device' but the version that came back was the same except the thumbnail cover (only). I called customer services and they fixed it for me but couldn't explain the reason.

If ebooks had a version number like software things would be greatly clarified.