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Old 10-01-2010, 05:36 PM   #1
DiapDealer
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Atrociously formatted Kindle books.

I don't know if this warrants being "stickied", but I would certainly appreciate a thread that points out Kindle books that are so terribly formatted as to be unreadable. No hate, no rage... just a "somebody really blew it on this one" kind of thread.

First in line would be 'The Last Page' by Anthony Huso... a fantastic debut fantasy that was treated horribly by the Kindle (though I've been assured that it was the fault of the publisher -- Tor Books).

The book makes extensive use of some fonts that the Kindle doesn't support, so the publisher used images to replace them. That wouldn't have been so bad, but the images were very faint and hugely out of proportion with the text size. It resulted in very distracting gobbledy-gook that forced me to return the ebook for the printed version. Tor blamed Amazon... Amazon blamed Tor... I punted.

This was one of those rare cases where I would have "killed" for a Topaz version of this book.

EDIT: You can use the "Look Inside" feature on Amazon's website to compare page 9 to Location 90-105 of the free sample.

Last edited by DiapDealer; 10-01-2010 at 05:48 PM.
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Old 10-01-2010, 07:08 PM   #2
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Yup. It really is awful. Making my case on Topaz formatting. As I've said several times before, shame on Amazon for not doing it properly.
Have you tried other formats, such as LIT or ePub to see how they fare?
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Old 10-01-2010, 07:19 PM   #3
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Have you tried other formats, such as LIT or ePub to see how they fare?
The Epub from B&N does a slightly better job of matching the images with the text size (and vertical alignment) but it's still a trainwreck.

I feel sorry for the author... this being his debut and all. Live and learn I guess.

Last edited by DiapDealer; 10-01-2010 at 07:21 PM.
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Old 10-01-2010, 07:30 PM   #4
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Call Amazon and they will give you your money back
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Old 10-01-2010, 07:37 PM   #5
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Call Amazon and they will give you your money back
I already did that and got the printed version.

I'm just looking to start a stickied "heads-up" thread that can warn people about books that you are better off killing a tree to read.
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Old 10-01-2010, 08:10 PM   #6
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I really hope Amazon will move to ePub sometime, the recent update to the Previewer gives me hope.

It's sad that often fan transcribes are better than the ones publishers themselves put out.
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Old 10-01-2010, 08:15 PM   #7
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That is not going to happen seeing that Amazon owns mobi reader format. And that is what the Kindle is based off of. Personally I found a lot of epub formated ebooks to not be that great either.
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Old 10-01-2010, 09:00 PM   #8
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This is the area that I'm disappointed most with in e-readers - basically just a lack of effort in making e-books that are properly formatted.

That's the step that needs to be taken to really make e-books take off -along with a mass market price. Though I suspect that will go hand in hand - once a lot of people get e-readers, they'll demand better quality books.

Basically it's like if companies mostly offered 64 and 96 kbps mp3s. That wouldn't be acceptable. Even at the start of mp3 sales, they were at least 128 kbps. But even that was deemed to be no longer good enough.
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Old 10-02-2010, 01:18 AM   #9
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I had a book that had major issues and I complained to both amazon and the publisher. Not only did the publisher send me a free pbook copy, the kindle version was removed from the store a week later!

Don't just complain to amazon, they just sell the stuff, go to the publisher too!
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Old 10-02-2010, 01:45 AM   #10
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I think we had a hall of shame thread at one point about horridly formatted books. can't remember if it was here before the great split or in generals. it is definetly sticky worthy.

you can tag this thread or PM Pooh, or I will if you'd rather not
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