On e-books
Friday, February 12th, 2010 10:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranthI'm getting somewhat disillusioned by commercial e-books. I'm working on a sample of four authorised e-books in MobiPocket format, purchased for actual money, and two of them have distracting typographical issues.
I've mentioned, in a previous post, the ligature problem in Whiskey and Water, where the ligature 'fi' has been rendered throughout as 'f' -- giving offce, fne, fngers etc. Bear's Ink and Steel is peppered with random paragraph breaks, and there is something odd about the italic text -- words beginning with L are often capitalised unnecessarily, double-l is also often capitalised (giving you'LL, aLL).
This is annoying, and it is sloppy. If these were dead-tree books, I would expect typographical errors of this magnitude to be fixed pre-publication. After all, until very recently I was paid good money to do this level of checking for the place up the road ...
Have emailed vendors of affected ebooks (W H Smith, Mobipocket) though I suspect they'll both say they're only distributors. Watch this space.
I've mentioned, in a previous post, the ligature problem in Whiskey and Water, where the ligature 'fi' has been rendered throughout as 'f' -- giving offce, fne, fngers etc. Bear's Ink and Steel is peppered with random paragraph breaks, and there is something odd about the italic text -- words beginning with L are often capitalised unnecessarily, double-l is also often capitalised (giving you'LL, aLL).
This is annoying, and it is sloppy. If these were dead-tree books, I would expect typographical errors of this magnitude to be fixed pre-publication. After all, until very recently I was paid good money to do this level of checking for the place up the road ...
Have emailed vendors of affected ebooks (W H Smith, Mobipocket) though I suspect they'll both say they're only distributors. Watch this space.
