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

[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.