Nathan Bransford - The Forums

For a brief period last night, CNN ran this story as a headline:

Digital piracy hits the e-book industry
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/01/01/eboo ... =allsearch

Now, from the complaint department:

I have a lil 2.5 pound netbook (no ereader), so downloaded the Kindle app for PCs and bought a standard priced (9.99) ebook for research purposes for my WIP. GOOD GRIEF. At least 10 times throughout the book, sentences suddenly went BOLD on me; the word "I've" never appeared that way, but rather as Ite, Ile, etc., along with numerous other contracted words botched, and; one entire paragraph was duplicated in the middle of nowhere. It became apparent very quickly that OCR (optical character recognition) software was used to turn a print book into a digital book ... AND NOBODY PROOFED THE DAMNED THING!!!!!

If this level of carelessness is the future of digital "printing" you can count me out.

Sharon

Shannon,

Yes, the future doesn't look so bright when it's fully of typos, does it?

The fact is there are many ways to get books onto the Kindle platform. Obviously, the producer of the book you paid good money for just uploaded whatever they had through the Amazon site set up for this, and you are paying the price of their lack of attention to what was going on with the text. Some publishers may be in a mad rush to put their content into ebook formats, maybe that's what's contributing to the mess.

Other providers do careful formatting, or use a service that formats your book properly. There's a world of difference.

I have an eReader, and so far I've not a bought any books for it - instead I've downloaded dozens of public domain books (Shakespeare, Verne, Jane Austen, Jack London, Mark Twain, etc)... sometimes there are some errors, but by-in-large they have been pretty well done. However, if I paid $9.99 for one I would expect the same quality I would get in a printed copy.