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Old 11-29-2008, 11:52 AM   #1
carandol
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Fantasy Cartographers of the World, Unite!

Everyone knows that fantasy novels have maps. Maps are important. With a map you can trace the travels of your heroes as they trek through trackless wastes, over snow-swept mountains, through deadly swamps and... etc., etc.

So there you are. You've just bought the latest fantasy trilogy as an ebook. And you're congratulating yourself on how light and slim your ebook reader is compared to the mighty tome you would normally have to hold up with your feeble, geekish wrists. And your heroes are surrounded by man-eating octopoids in the Swamps of Despair, scant leagues from the safety of the Tower of Hope. And you turn to the map, to see exactly where the Tower of Hope *is* in relation to the Swamps of Despair, and whether our doughty band will be ambushed on the way by the army of the Lord of Doom which is marching down from the Crepuscular Mountains...

And the map is the size of a postage stamp. In the paper book it was a lovely double-page spread, with curly edges and sailing ships and sea monsters and the names of a dozen nations and two-score cities lovingly rendered in gorgeous calligraphy. But on your ebook reader it's a tiny rectangle about 2cm by 3cm, in which you can just about make out the coastline, and what might be some mountains, and many indecipherable blobs and scratchings which could be writing but you'll never know for sure.

Come on publishers, don't just run your novels through an automatic conversion program that produces graphics for the tiniest screen imaginable. Think about who your readers are, and what they're reading your ebooks on!
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Old 02-13-2009, 04:46 AM   #2
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That's one of the things that really disapoint me. Can't they even bother to make the map full page?!

But no one seems to care.
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Old 02-13-2009, 04:49 AM   #3
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Ah, but think - you could buy the p-book as well and keep it open on the map page whilst you read on your Reader.....
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Old 02-13-2009, 05:34 AM   #4
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So that's a marketing strategy to make us buy twice the same book?
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Old 02-13-2009, 07:12 AM   #5
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Now there is a thought !.....
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Old 02-13-2009, 08:00 AM   #6
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Actually, it seems some publishers care. I recently bought some Roger Taylor fantasies from Mushroom eBooks which had tiny maps. I wrote a polite letter to the company complaining about this, and got a reply within about half an hour to the effect that they hadn't realised that their older ebooks didn't display properly on newer devices, and now I'd pointed it out, they'd make new editions ASAP. They also sent me a jpeg of the map in question to be going on with.

So perhaps if we write a letter to the publisher every time we get an unsatisfactory ebook, we might see some results.
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