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

[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).