Kindle and quality.

[ilthit]

I love Kindle because it's so easy, and I can get books to my iPad and phone with the minimum of fuss. I also like the word-lookup function and the navigational functions.

The only downside is that so many of the books look like they're hastily put together. I've been reading the Phryne Fisher novels' Kindle editions, which seem legit and not pirates, and there are extra paragraph breaks and sometimes missing paragraph breaks all over the place, and in the latest one, a paragraph that started twice. (A chunk of it was repeated.)

How common is this, what do you think? Not just with Kindle, but with ebooks in general? I mean, I'm sure it's the fault of individual publishers not proofreading the Kindle editions closely enough, but it's funny that it happens in ebooks so much more than in dead-tree books. I have half a mind of asking for my money back sometimes, but then I do like the books, and I like to pay for what I like. I'd just like a version doesn't have these distracting mistakes.

Comments

[jumpuphigh]

I've been finding that the quality of books in epub format has been getting better. I still encounter stuff that is bad formatting on occasion but less and less with newer releases.

[ilthit]

Some books have been absolutely perfect, like the e-version of The World of Gangs that I read recently. I guess it must be down to publishers in a hurry. I'm not sure what the best way to improve this in the future is - I guess I'll just write to the original publisher (rather than Amazon) to complain about it, but keep my flawed copies in lieu of anything better.

[jumpuphigh]

There are definitely differences between publishers. Baen is usually good with the occasional bit of weird formatting. Harper-Collins seems to have more problems. Some publishers are still thinking they are making pdfs and any publisher that I've seen that is doing anything like cookbooks or knitting pattern books seems to have yet to figure it out.

[jumpuphigh]

And because the Universe likes to call me a liar, I am now reading an epub from the library where pretty much every single page has at least one word where the first letter of the word is missing. The first two books in this series were fine.

*le sigh*

[ilthit]

Nothing's perfect!

[purplecat]

I somewhat get the impression that epub (and I suspect other formats) are a bit write once debug everywhere - certainly there are a number of epubs that display fine within the epub reader on my Mac that will not display properly (or even crash) my sony ereader. It reminds me a lot of the situation in the early days of netscape and IE when websites frequently only displayed properly on one browser.

I don't know if this is same with the Kindle and mobi format - I would have expected that to be better since there is much tighter control over the devices that will display mobi books.

At any rate, it has all the hallmarks of an immature standard and I'd expect rapid improvement over the next few years.

[ilthit]

I should actually be interested to see if an epub version of a book I have on Kindle (in a situation where neither is a pirate) is similarly affected. I don't really know how I could, though, without paying for the book twice. Although I don't suppose it would tell us much.

It's not really a display issue at all, just poor formatting. You could have misplaced or missing paragraph breaks and misplaced chunks of text in a paperback, too. It's a whole different set of mistakes in a pirate that's just text scanned from a dead-tree format book - there you get S's instead of A's and surprise italics.

I do hope it will get up to a better standard soon, and that publishers start proofreading e-versions better.

[purplecat]

Well I was partly wondering if the formatting issues, like missing paragraph breaks, might be device specific - e.g. with one reader recognising the line return character used and another reader not. Similarly missing text could be caused by software misinterpreting the close of "do not display this text" tags and so on.

[malkingrey]

I think it depends a lot on whether the publisher is working from an electronic version of the manuscript as originally submitted (a lot of publishers these days ask for either electronic-only MSS or a combination of electronic and hardcopy), or whether they're working from a scanned hardcopy version of the published book.

A lot also depends on whether or not the publisher bothers to have somebody proofread the e-book before it's released. Dead-tree books are copyedited, and have the copyedited MS gone over by the author before being set into type, and then the typeset MS is gone over again by both the publishing house and the author before being sent to the printer. Even so, errors will creep in. Sometimes it's just because no matter how many sets of eyes look at a thing, something's going to get missed; other times, very bad stuff can happen at the printer's end and not get noticed until angry book buyers start sending back their copies. Turning hardcopy into e-text, if the publisher is converting something that never had an electronic MS, often involves taking apart a physical copy of the book and scanning it page by page, which not only preserves any existing errors but opens the way for even more.

Some publishing houses clearly take care with the process of turning hardcopy into an ebook; others just as clearly don't do much more than pour the however-generated e-text into a standard template and don't bother much with it after that.

Your best bet is probably to write to the publisher about any errors you find. It's not likely to get you a better version of that particular book, but it might encourage them to take more care with the process in the future.

[ilthit]

If a e-book shows signs of being scanned from a hard copy I immediately suspect it's a pirate. The book series I've been reading that has a lot of errors is from the 90s, though...

I really suspect they've just not bothered to proofread the e-versions thoroughly.

[malkingrey]

It used to be mostly pirates who worked from scanned hardcopy. These days, though, a number of legitimate publishers are working on bringing their backlist titles out as e-books, and a number of authors are doing the same thing with their own works for which the rights have reverted. In both cases, if the original book was produced during the typewriter era, or in the early days of word processing, scanning a sacrificed hardcopy may be the only way -- short of re-keying the whole thing -- to get an electronic text.

[ilthit]

Fair enough! It's a shame if they don't then also proofread the result. I'm thinking of complaining to Allen & Unwin over the Phryne Fisher novels, though I may have to track the errors in my Android Kindle app to see it's not just the iPad app messing it up.

[holyschist]

In both cases, if the original book was produced during the typewriter era, or in the early days of word processing, scanning a sacrificed hardcopy may be the only way -- short of re-keying the whole thing -- to get an electronic text.

This. And lack of proofread backlist books from that era is a big reason I haven't wholesale converted to ebooks, since so many of my favorites are either not available as ebooks or only available as subpar OCR'd texts because a lot of legitimate publishers just don't seem to care much (and I'm not a huge fan of putting several hours into cracking and proofreading a book I bought just so it's readable--and putting myself in an iffy legal area just to use the product I bought).

[shana]

It might also be an artifact of the iPad version of the Kindle reader; I didn't notice odd paragraph breaks in the Phryne Fisher books when reading on my Kindle.

[ilthit]

Did you read all of them? I have the Introducing the Honourable Phryne Fisher collection, the TV tie-in cover e-book version of book 4, and book 5 with the traditional cover. I suppose it could be the Kindle app, too.

[shana]

I've read all of them, but the American version put out by Poisoned Pen Press. I suppose they could have done extra proofreading/formatting. I'm still waiting for them to release the Corinna Chapman books in e-format.

[ilthit]

Different version, then. Even my Kindle versions are attributed to Allen & Unwin. Amazon must have matched the version it offered to my region, even though I bought it through the US Amazon site (since Kindle Store is only accessed through the US Amazon site).

I'm drowning in delicious piles of lady detective books, thanks to recent recs, but Corinna Chapman is on my list, too!

[holyschist]

I encounter atrocious typos (and in one particularly annoying case, an entire book in bold text) fairly frequently. I don't think typos are an issue of "bugs" that are platform-specific--it's usually in older books that I strongly suspect were OCR'd and then not actually proofread by a human. In some cases I have the paper books to compare, and the horrible misspellings and other issues were definitely not in the original.

tl'dr: what malkingrey said.

Extra paragraph breaks and the like can be an artifact of poor scanning or of poor conversion from one ebook format to another; some formats are also designed to size for specific screens, and don't adapt well to other sizes of screens.

[ilthit]

Are you sure those weren't pirates? A pirate copy I had from Kindle (and later got my money back for because ugh, pirates) was mostly in italics, having been scanned from a hard copy and not proofread.

[holyschist]

Not unless pirates are masquerading as the rights-holding publisher on Amazon (and the author's descendants who run her estate don't seem to be worried about the ebooks).

The books are old enough that they would have been OCR'd, and a lot of publishers just don't seem to care about ebook quality (perhaps because they'd rather not sell them in the first place). An all-bold book just means one unclosed tag at the beginning that no one bothered to fix.