Book Quality

[jimhen]

I am a PRS-505 user (and lover) and regularly download books from Sony's store with no issues. I recently purchased Nigel Hamilton's Bill Clinton bio "Mastering the Presidency" and noticed annoying elements in the typeface. In particular there are bizarre and inappropriate hyphenations of words throughout the text, e.g. con-gress, con-versation and many more.

This is really annoying. The book is great but this format is distracting. This is the first book I have seen this issue. Are there any more out there and what is the cause?

[Dr. Drib]

I have no i-dea wh-at youre talkin-g about !

_______

Seriously, there always seems to be some kind of problem. Perhaps Mr. Hamilton had lousy proof readers, or the conversion program missed something.

One book I purchased from Sony and read had annoying space breaks between paragraphs. This was particularly insulting to me, because the author used space breaks to signify time distinctions in the narrative. (Interestingly, there have been a number of doctoral dissertations on the use of Time signified by how and why authors choose to signify narrative breaks in time.)



Don

[revfish]

My guess for this format issue is that the original text in the print book was hyphenated like that and the text was scanned back into a computer, retaining the hyphenations.

Just my 2¢.

[JSWolf]

If it was scanned, it would not have all those hyphens.

[Taylor514ce]

Artifacts such as this are all to common with e-books. For commercial e-books, it should be unacceptable, particularly as we are paying, usually, equivalent prices as printed books.

Complain. Get your money back.

[dhbailey]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

If it was scanned, it would not have all those hyphens.

I think more likely is it was a computer file from Word or WP or some such and those hyphens were put in as hard-hyphens by someone who wasn't very good at using the word-processor program. Then the computer file was run through a translator, and the code for hard-hyphens was retained, while any soft-hyphens were gotten rid of.

It's hard to know just where the blame actually lies, but for a book which costs money, that's definitely unacceptable.

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

One book I purchased from Sony and read had annoying space breaks between paragraphs. This was particularly insulting to me, because the author used space breaks to signify time distinctions in the narrative.

I sooooo hate it when a book does this. I flat out refuse to read a book that's formated this way. And yeah, it makes anything from Pratchett annoying and difficult to follow.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Valloric

I sooooo hate it when a book does this. I flat out refuse to read a book that's formatted this way. And yeah, it makes anything from Pratchett annoying and difficult to follow.

I just get the Discworld eBooks in a format I can remove the DRM and then format shift for my 505. Works quite well and quite easily. No annoying paragraph spaces.

[worxland]

Originally Posted by Valloric

I sooooo hate it when a book does this. I flat out refuse to read a book that's formated this way. And yeah, it makes anything from Pratchett annoying and difficult to follow.

Woe to you for putting Pratchett and annoying in the same sentence. Next time concentrate on the story and not on the format. I have lots of pbooks, .html, .doc, .txt, .pdf files from him with all kinds of format (good and bad) - and the word annoying hasn't even started to think about an appearance in the neighborhood.

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by worxland

Woe to you for putting Pratchett and annoying in the same sentence. Next time concentrate on the story and not on the format. I have lots of pbooks, .html, .doc, .txt, .pdf files from him with all kinds of format (good and bad) - and the word annoying hasn't even started to think about an appearance in the neighborhood.

Oh for the love of God...

I wasn't bashing Pratchett, but the idiot who made the e-book. Pratchett is of course amazing, hats off to the guy. I'm currently going through his entire repertoire (eight books down). And yes, I have the entire series in several formats (primarily LIT from Fictionwise, but I have a few p-books as well), although I'm converting them to LRF as I go along.

[jimhen]

Originally Posted by jimhen

I am a PRS-505 user (and lover) and regularly download books from Sony's store with no issues. I recently purchased Nigel Hamilton's Bill Clinton bio "Mastering the Presidency" and noticed annoying elements in the typeface. In particular there are bizarre and inappropriate hyphenations of words throughout the text, e.g. con-gress, con-versation and many more.

This is really annoying. The book is great but this format is distracting. This is the first book I have seen this issue. Are there any more out there and what is the cause?

As an update to this issue I called Sony Customer Service and had a lengthy discussion about my problem. I was given a case number and told someone would call me back within 24 hours after they had checked the book themselves. That was a week ago and so far no call. mmmmmm.......

[ShortNCuddlyAm]

PLaying devil's advocate... Pbooks have their faults, too - usually uncaught typos, the occasionaly continuity error; but also books bound in the wrong order, pages creased and uncut; and every now and again some real howlers on the back - my two favourites were a book on the 60s classed as Fiction, and the back blurb starting with what the copywriter called the famous first sentence or somesuch - and got it wrong.

The ebook I've just finished had the odd hyphenation problem - but it was free so I'm not complaining too much!

[jimhen]

Well, I finally heard from Sony and they gave me a credit for the value of this book and a promise to let me know when a new download will be available.

One satisfied customer!