Ebooks that are not quite right

[caleb72]

Has anyone purchased an ebook from Amazon (or elsewhere) and noticed some problems with the text?

I'm reading Radix by Attanasio at the moment and I've been noticing things like:

• 'y' is actually represented as 'v'
• some words joined together
• incorrect accents over letters
• erroneous line breaks

I'm guessing that this must be due to a hard copy being scanned and the recognition software not quite getting it right.

So far, it hasn't really stopped me as it's always obvious what I'm supposed to be reading, but it did surprise me a bit coming from Amazon.

Is this sort of thing common?

Regards
Caleb

[JeremyR]

Unfortunately, it's very common.

Between that, missing chapter breaks and TOC, a lot of bought books are a real mess.

I honestly think they need to work on improving that, instead of the constant hardware improvements. But the latter makes news, correcting books does not.

[The Terminator]

I use kobo and read quite a bit (bought and rented ebooks) through the library i have had a couple of joined words but not from the book store

[JSWolf]

It could also be a conversion from a PDF source. Novel length PDF does not convert without errors. And a lot of the time, they are stupid common easily fixed errors. In some conversions, I've seen the end of the italics run into the first non-italic word.

[AlexBell]

As Jeremy said malformatted ebooks are quite common. There are many threads complaining about poor quality. If it's any consolation the worst formatted ebook I have ever read was from Amazon (Zionism: the Enemy of the Jews by Alan Hart) It is terrible, and I would be deeply ashamed if a book like that came out over my signature.

I did a scathing review on Amazon, including saying that if I could give it a minus score I'd rate it at minus 10. To their credit they printed the review, but they still haven't fixed the book.

Regards, Alex

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by caleb72

Has anyone purchased an ebook from Amazon (or elsewhere) and noticed some problems with the text?

<...>

I'm guessing that this must be due to a hard copy being scanned and the recognition software not quite getting it right.

So far, it hasn't really stopped me as it's always obvious what I'm supposed to be reading, but it did surprise me a bit coming from Amazon.

Is this sort of thing common?

Regrettably so.

I suspect there wasn't an electronic form of Radix available, so as you guessed, a hardcopy was scanned, OCRed and converted. This is done for Amazon by an outsourced operation in India, and the results of the scan and OCR are what gets published as a Kindle edition. As far as I know, they do not copy edit or proofread to correct errors before packaging.
______
Dennis

[vaughnmr]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Regrettably so.

I suspect there wasn't an electronic form of Radix available, so as you guessed, a hardcopy was scanned, OCRed and converted. This is done for Amazon by an outsourced operation in India, and the results of the scan and OCR are what gets published as a Kindle edition. As far as I know, they do not copy edit or proofread to correct errors before packaging.
______
Dennis

Unfortunately, all of the publishers are doing the same thing, not just Amazon.

[caleb72]

It's a bit slack. I was hoping that one of the beautiful things about ebooks would be that older books would be given new life.

This wasn't exactly what I had in mind.

Regards
Caleb

[voracious71]

I just finished reading a book about the case that The Exorcist was based on..and there were errors in it that were just strange.. Long rows of repeated letters and the word "possessed" took up almost the whole line on occasion.

It was freaking me out..almost got some holy water at the church to sprinkle on my Kindle.

[caleb72]

I was just checking out some of the items that people have uploaded into the forum's "library" and I note that people are putting some effort into correctly formatting and representing books for the use of others.

I find it interesting to see things play in reverse these days; that the output from publishers seems to fall flat compared to the output of individuals who produce in their spare time for no fee.

Regards
Caleb

[neilmarr]

All it takes is a thorough editorial proof read of each format before release. Many publishers were caught so on-the-hop by the sudden popularity of ebooks that they hadn't geared up to cope. Some smaller houses ran to the badly flawed Smashwords 'metgrinder' auto-formatting. That's a weak excuse and not a good reason. Badly presented books should NOT be on sale. My own wee house has been geared to ebooks as well as paperbacks for a decade. You'll find no such glaring errors in our stuff. but we're little ... so who cares? Neil

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by caleb72

I was just checking out some of the items that people have uploaded into the forum's "library" and I note that people are putting some effort into correctly formatting and representing books for the use of others.

I find it interesting to see things play in reverse these days; that the output from publishers seems to fall flat compared to the output of individuals who produce in their spare time for no fee.

The people uploading here are scratching a personal itch. They want copy that is properly formatted and reads well on their device, and take pains to create books that will work on the device they create for.

There is also the problem that a lot of the public domain texts used as starting points are in poor shape. Early Project Gutenberg files, for example, dating from before Distributed Proofreaders became their feed, often leave a lot to be desired. For example, at this point I suspect MR contributor HarryT's ebook versions of Dickens are the best available, because he has been painstakingly proofing his electronic versions against good print releases and correcting as he goes.

Doing it properly is time consuming work. Publishers are increasingly not doing it to cut costs and save money.
______
Dennis

[Jellby]

It wouldn't be so bad if publishers were willing to fix the ebook versions and let users download the corrected files for free.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by voracious71

It was freaking me out..almost got some holy water at the church to sprinkle on my Kindle.

LOL

[greencat]

Originally Posted by Jellby

It wouldn't be so bad if publishers were willing to fix the ebook versions and let users download the corrected files for free.

This does occasionally happen on the Kindle. I've had a couple of notifications over the last year from Amazon that the publisher has made a new version available and that I can download it.