Pet E-book peeves

[kindlekitten]

Originally Posted by Alan OldStudent

Hello all,

KindleKitten asks me:


I gather you're quite partial to the Kindle. The main reason I did not get it is that I did not like the idea of vendor lock-in. When Amazon remotely deleted a couple of George Orwell books from their customers' after discovering that it did not have the proper distribution rights, it both alarmed me and turned me off.

No doubt this was human error and not corporate wickedness on Amazon's part, and I like Amazon. But this unfortunate incident made me conscious of the need to support more open devices.

To the somewhat clueless first-time buyer (like me) of this new technology, Kindle does not seem to encourage use of other formats, especially EPUB. In 1960s lingo, Kindle puts out heavy Microsoft-style "vibes."

Moreover, being on the USA's senior citizen retirement program (Social Security), I do not have a lot of disposable income. So I opted for what seemed like the more open-format-friendly alternative when a local bookstore offered the Sony-600 for $150 US.


Regards,

Alan OldStudent
The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living -- Socrates
My Web Site

unfortunately that was the Amazon shot hear 'round the world. a mistake was made and handled incorrectly. IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN.

as far as the "lock-in" goes. for the umpteenth time. you are NOT. just to mention a few; Baen, Smashwords, Kobo, Project Guttenberg, here.... and there are quite a few more

[Ben Thornton]

All DRM sales lock you in to that DRM mechanism - so Amazon locks you into their DRM, those using Adobe with ePub lock you into theirs, and Apple locks you into their different ePub scheme. IIRC, there's a difference with Nook ePubs too.

The only thing that's more open about the Adobe DRM is that multiple vendors use it, so others could potentially join in.

Where content has no DRM, there's no lock-in. So all readers can read content from Smashwords, Baen etc.

My main peeve is limited access to content, in which DRM plays a significant role.

[Alan OldStudent]

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

unfortunately that was the Amazon shot hear 'round the world. a mistake was made and handled incorrectly. IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN.e

I'm sure you're correct, KindleKitten. They made a mistake and will do all in their power not to repeat it.

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

as far as the "lock-in" goes. for the umpteenth time. you are NOT. just to mention a few; Baen, Smashwords, Kobo, Project Guttenberg, here.... and there are quite a few more

Thanks for the information.

By the way, I did not see your picture that the mods considered inappropriate, as I joined after the kerfuffle. But the photo in your signature line looks charming to me.




Regards,

Alan OldStudent
The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living -- Socrates
My Web Site

[Alan OldStudent]

Originally Posted by Juliette

"But paper smells better!"

There, I've said it.

No, really, I've no real pet peeves. Maybe for PDFs, but I've got the right reader for those pesky little characters too now. (No, reflow isn't the best solution of they put data like title or author in the margin; yes, I know that PDFs aren't technically ebooks)

What do you use to read PFDs, Juliette?

Regards,

Alan OldStudent
The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living -- Socrates
My Web Site

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Well, I'm not so sure of that. The way to the CSS does it is to use...

body {
widows: 0;
orphans: 0
}

So given that 0 is off and any other number is on. Maybe we are both right? I dunno exactly.

Not always 0 is "off". In this case, 0 means that the minimum number of lines allowed before/after a pagebreak is 0, i.e., that any number is allowed, included 1, which is when a widow/orphan appears.

The default is 2, which means that a minimum of 2 lines is needed before/after a pagebreak, preventing the occurrence of widows/orphans, because a single line is less than the minimum of 2 lines.

But this CSS property can do nothing against chapters ending with one-line paragraphs, for instance. In this case, a pagebreak before this last paragraph is allowed, but it would have been avoided by all means by a human typesetter.

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Why would an OCRed eBook be any better as PDF then say ePub or Mobipocket? They wouldn't. But what really peeves me that has yet to be mentioned is using PDF as the source format. I've seen plenty of errors from using PDF as a source format.

I did not write that correctly ..... [story of my life]

Scanned pages saved as pdf are better than anything that undergoes OCR without further proofing ....

[stargazertony]

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

...as soon as the military gets used to having these in the field for manuals, pdf's etc. I'm sure there will be a troop proof one made

Yes but it would cost $18,000.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by GeoffC

I did not write that correctly ..... [story of my life]

Scanned pages saved as pdf are better than anything that undergoes OCR without further proofing ....

Which is why I'm not OCRing my p-books after scanning them. I just have to many books and not enough time to proof them.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by stargazertony

Yes but it would cost $18,000.

So? When was cost ever a problem for the military?

[corona]

Originally Posted by Alan OldStudent

I got the Sony 600 a few weeks ago, and I found figuring out how to use it to be quite a daunting, frustrating, and unpleasant experience...

Maybe you should get a Kobo. Very simple, plays well with Calibre, appears as a drive in Win. Explorer, does ePub.

You can convert PDFs to ePub with Calibre. In my experience this delivers a perfectly readable, if not perfectly pretty, result.

[Momine]

If PDF is no good as a source format, what is?

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by corona

Maybe you should get a Kobo. Very simple, plays well with Calibre, appears as a drive in Win. Explorer, does ePub.

You can convert PDFs to ePub with Calibre. In my experience this delivers a perfectly readable, if not perfectly pretty, result.

That would depend on the PDF, I'd think. If it's not OCR'd, I doubt you'll get a perfectly readable result.

Originally Posted by Momine

If PDF is no good as a source format, what is?

Any text based format, where you can add formatting. I'd say epub is a good format. Maybe RTF. My sources are in unpacked epub files.

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by Momine

If PDF is no good as a source format, what is?

How did you generate the PDF ?

[speakingtohe]

The other thing is unnecessary typos from "real" publishers. I am reading Rex Stout's Three Doors to Death right now, from Random House, and some of the typos leave me really puzzled trying to figure them out. I get that they were scanned and OCRed but I don't get why the final text, and the scan, are not compared by hand and corrected. It could even be outsourced off-shore; I can't imagine it would add more than $200 or so to the ebook production which is easily amortized over any realistic sales demand.

Why go offshore. I am sure alot of retired people or the just plain picky would jump at the chance to proof read ebooks for a very small sum.

Free books to read, something useful to do with their computer, passing the time and a sense of accomplishment are just a few of the benefits to the elderly proofreader.

A publisher could shop out the same book to two people and ask for a plain text output and compare the versions with software. Then have them formatted by the same people or others.

An added advantage to hiring the elderly is that they might be less inclined to put the book on the darknet

And of course many typos are easily spotted with a good word processor.

Perfection may be unattainable but I am sure it would be easy and cheap to come close.
I am pretty sure the first to do this will have a reliable trustworthy group of proofreaders in no time flat.

[frquixote]

Originally Posted by corona

Maybe you should get a Kobo. Very simple, plays well with Calibre, appears as a drive in Win. Explorer, does ePub.

You can convert PDFs to ePub with Calibre. In my experience this delivers a perfectly readable, if not perfectly pretty, result.

My Sony PRS-505 does all of the above as well (so does the PRS-600).

I don't use the Sony Reader desktop at all and I use ADE only to get the DRM'd books down to my PC so they can be liberated and then loaded to the reader through Calibre. Its easiest to get epubs and INEPTEPUB them because then they are ready to load without any re-formatting, but there are similar tools for PDF that will then free them so they can be re-processed through Calibre.