First Encounter with Bad ADE PDF formatting

[Trebro]

So I got my first library e-book, Philip K. Dick's "Man in the High Castle." It's an amazing read...despite the formatting.

I have spent so many years reading message boards, newsgroups, e-mails, and blogs that I can handle a few formatting issues when reading.

However, no matter how I set the font size, this book just looks bad in PDF format, and a person with lower tolerance probably would have given up. The errors are staggering and numerous.

Words cut off in the middle of the screen, the original page numbers show up randomly on the screen, often below the text, and a line of poetry was butchered beyond my ability to read it. I didn't expect perfection, but man, that was rough to handle.

Now, I got this for free, so I'm not crying. But I had *paid* for this PDF, I'd have been mighty mad.

I'm definitely going to think twice before reading an Adobe Digital Editions PDF again, and I certain won't buy an e-book in that format.

I noticed B&N has the same e-book for $10. I sincerely hope it's formatted better than this one.

I guess moral of the story is don't count on being able to read PDFs very well until they start to make them for smaller screens or until I opt to get a bigger e-reader for home use? Or was I just being picky?

(Hope this is an okay place to discuss this. Sorry if I misplaced it.)

-Rob

[tech_au]

PDFs have always been a last resort for me. Thankfully epub ebooks are becoming more common.
I've generally had a good run with purchased PDFs but a couple had bad formatting such as words split between lines and not getting the chapter headings once reflow was turned(selecting large font size on Sonys).
PDF capability also varies quite drastically from pretty hopeless to quite decent depending on the reader.

[GeoffC]

Hi Rob, and welcome to MR - I think you've discovered why pdf is poorly received here on MR - certainly for novels.

You could try putting the pdf through Calibre - but I suspect even that good render would struggle to provide a decent reading book for you.

Never mind - onto the next ....

[JSWolf]

Every eBook format has poorly made eBooks. So are you saying that if you get one of these poorly made eBooks, that the format it is in is one you will never ever again use? That would mean you might as well go back to paper books.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Every eBook format has poorly made eBooks. So are you saying that if you get one of these poorly made eBooks, that the format it is in is one you will never ever again use? That would mean you might as well go back to paper books.

Until you get one of those paper books that are a direct printout of Project Gutenberg texts.

[GeoffC]

Rob

Where did you source the pdf from - I wonder if this is just poor scanning saved into pdf format ....

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Until you get one of those paper books that are a direct printout of Project Gutenberg texts.

[Trebro]

Originally Posted by GeoffC

Rob

Where did you source the pdf from - I wonder if this is just poor scanning saved into pdf format ....

It was a library e-book, so I didn't have any control, and since it's DRM locked, I couldn't try to re-format it. Had this been a free PDF, I'd have played around with it in Calibre and seen what I could do to fix it up a bit.

As to the other poster's question of giving up on a badly formatted file type--my point is that I already had a pretty good idea that PDFs don't work very well on a smaller screen, so if i can avoid them, that's going to be the plan. Can't see the point to making reading harder if it doesn't have to be.

I also noted that I'm quite capable of reading anything badly formatted if i really want to, as the internet has never been known as a perfectly formatted paradise.

[sassanik]

It looks like it was put out by Knopf Doubleday, which makes me surprised that the book has such poor formatting, though I suppose I should not be. Its known that a number of novels that the big publishing houses have released have been poorly formatted.


Amy