09-02-2008, 12:58 PM | #1 |
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eBook Formatting in General
Curiosity questions...
When I purchase a book from Amazon and the formatting is bad, I report it to them, they correct it and I re-download it (usually rather quickly). My questions are: - I don't see (or notice 'cuz I'm in my own little Kindle world) people with other eBook readers complaining about bad formatting (other than public domain books, self published books and ePub). Do other book formats have the same issues as the Kindle formatted books? Are you having issues with typos, bad justification and other weird glitches. - If you do have issues, who are you contacting for corrections (Sony?, the publisher?...)? - Is bad formatting rampant no matter the file format? |
09-02-2008, 02:35 PM | #2 |
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I buy most of mine through Fictionwise. No problems so far, and in fact, they are actually very well formatted. Have you bought from them?
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09-02-2008, 02:55 PM | #3 |
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Most of the eBooks I purchase, I convert to LRF, so if there is any bad formatting, I do clean it up. As for typos, I guess I've just been lucky with the eBooks I've been reading or the typos have not been all that noticeable.
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09-02-2008, 03:27 PM | #4 | |
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Quote:
One of the reasons I went with the Kindle was the lower book prices, so I'll only purchase outside of Amazon when there are items not available for the Kindle. |
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09-02-2008, 08:31 PM | #5 |
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The classic complaints about the Sony bookstore provided books are:
Fictionwise uses calibre for preparing their Sony format books and I have never had a formatting problem with their books. (There was a case where one book was not what it was labeled to be. I emailed them and received a note back within 12 hours saying that the problem had been corrected and to download the book again.) |
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09-03-2008, 10:51 AM | #6 |
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While I don't own a Sony I have also heard quite a few complaints about their classics being ridden with errors. So much so that many folks that had the special dollar discounts for classics claim they would rather get them here.
Dale |
09-03-2008, 12:24 PM | #7 |
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When I had my Sony 500, I bought Alex Ross' "The Rest is Noise" from the Sony Bookstore, which was so poorly formatted I would have returned it if there was any way of doing so, so I think formatting problems are not peculiar to the Kindle.
But the Kindle's biggest formatting problem, it seems to me, is that it allows publishers to sabotage their own product by producing books that are Topaz-formatted. It not only sabotages the book, it sabotages the device, and why Amazon allows it is a mystery to me. Jim |
09-03-2008, 01:16 PM | #8 | |
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Dale |
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09-03-2008, 03:44 PM | #9 |
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I've purchased several pretty bad ebooks. The one that has annoyed the most is Ian Stewart's Why Beauty is Truth - A History of Symmetry which is published by the Perseus Book Group and which I bought from Sony six months ago. Below is a screen capture of one page. I was so annoyed that I have yet to make it through the Preface. No, I haven't complained, yet (my bad). I did enjoy another ebook by Stewart and I posted at Sony a review which is quite favorable towards the work by Stewart but somewhat unfavorable regarding the ebook formatting (it had several minor problems which I thought I would warn potential buyers of and thought Sony and/or Perseus would take note, too). Sony apparently didn't like my negative comments so they only posted the positive portion of my review. Naturally, I was outraged and told them to post the entire unedited review or nothing and they chose the latter. Long story short: that's probably not the best way to report problems with ebook formatting, etc.
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09-05-2008, 09:39 AM | #10 | |
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It's enough of a problem that the first thing that I look at when I'm thinking of purchasing a book from Amazon is the size of the download. If the details of that aren't available, I download a sample and check. A big tip-off is if the book is published by St. Martin's Press. They're the big users. Jim |
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09-05-2008, 12:49 PM | #11 | |
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09-05-2008, 12:57 PM | #12 | |
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There was a big rush of complaints after the Julia Spencer-Fleming give-away in June. After downloading the free book I ordered the other books in the series. The free book kept freezing my Kindle. I had Amazon remove them and refund my money on the other books because I couldn't deal with Topaz (I do have the free book as a pdf). There's a thread about it here somewhere. It seems to be hit and miss. The sample I downloaded for the thread about the Kindle's zoom feature worked fine but some others... not so good. |
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09-06-2008, 11:12 PM | #13 |
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A feature I would really like to see implemented on the Kindle is an error flag. If you spot an error in a book, you could just scroll to the line and select to report an error. Next time you connect, they could upload your error reports. If corrections are made they could replace your copy. It would be so simple and would improve the quality of their books with very little effort from the readers. They'd also receive better data. I would imagine may complaints are along the lines of, "The formatting was poor and there were many typos." I doubt most people bother to list all the locations of the errors in their books. Many probably don't bother to report them at all. With an error flag, they'd know the specific location and I bet a lot more people would take a few seconds to do that than would take a few minutes to write an email.
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