The ebook saga continues

[tamaranth]

I bet you are all eager to hear the continuing saga of my complaints regarding ebook quality. (Previous entries here).

W H Smith have been curiously silent since my complaint, except to tell me that they'll let me know when I can download an updated version.

Mobipocket's customer care is handled by Amazon, for values of 'handled' including 'we trim the useful bits out of your email and forward it'. It has so far taken me over two weeks to get a useful response from Amazon, and the useful response is 'contact Penguin Group'.

So I have.

[intro bit]

I have so far purchased four e-books which I believe are produced by Penguin Books, and two of those e-books have problems.

[details of ebooks, with examples of problems]

If I had bought these books in paperback or hardcover I would return them and ask for my money back: because I've bought them as e-books, I don't have that option and there doesn't seem to be any recourse for a customer unhappy with production quality.

It's taken me several weeks to get as far as being told I should contact the Penguin Group so I'd very much appreciate a speedy resolution.

What I should have included, of course, is how I shall be posting all over Teh Interwebs about how ebooks are Not As Good. I do like the concept, and reading on my PDA, and being able to lug the Baroque Cycle around without permanent musculo-skeletal damage. I like being able to grab all manner of out-of-copyright texts from Project Gutenberg, already in Mobipocket format: I like being able to copy text from anywhere online and roll my own Palm e-Book.

But ...

Why Commercial E-Books Aren't Good Enough (Yet):
- I cannot Bookmooch ebooks or flog 'em on Amazon if I want to get rid of them.
- I cannot even lend them to a friend.
- it is very often more expensive to purchase a new title in ebook format than in hardcover.
- it is apparently impossible to purchase an out-of-print title (e.g. Anthony Burgess' A Dead Man in Deptford).
- there does not seem to be any single online retailer from whom I can acquire all the titles I want: I had to try four or five different places for my Elizabeth Bear ebooks in Mobipocket format for a UK customer, and I ended up buying from two different sites.
- and, most importantly right now: I can't inspect the goods before I buy, and if they turn out to be faulty my rights are unclear.

Comments

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

I'd go the whole hog and ask for your money back.

Amazon are being rather naughty passing you on to Penguin. Your contract of sale is with Amazon; if what you got isn't of merchantable quality or fit for purpose, that's Amazon's problem, and it's for Amazon to sort it out with Penguin later.

Would you like me to have a look at what the legal situation is? Irrespective of the fine technicalities, I suspect a district judge looking at, say, a small claim, would be reluctant to depart from decades of settled consumer protection law.

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

I think my contracts of sale are with Mobipocket and W H Smith, given those are the sites that actually sold me the books. Why Mobipocket customer 'care' is handled by Amazon is beyond me -- especially when they just forward emails without the correct details.

I would be interested in the legal situation, yes please!

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Point of note: when buying Kindle ebooks, Amazon's relationship with the original publisher is not that of a retailer, but that of another publisher who has sub-licensed the right to republish the book in a Kindle edition.

So if these are Kindle books you've got a problem with, Amazon are the responsible party.

Wild-assed guess: Penguin group (aka Roc and Ace) outsource their typesetting to a third party bureau. I've asked in the past if I could buy the DTP files to my own novels, and I've been told this will cost me $250 a pop. Kindle ebooks ... 1200 sales in a month will put you in the top 5 bestsellers! So I strongly suspect that Amazon do not go to the expense of buying the Quark or InDesign files, but scan, OCR, and convert a dead tree book, just like J. Random Pirate only without the quality control!

PS: Anthony Burgess died in 1993. I can tell you for sure that publishers in the late 90s weren't bothering to secure ebook rights because they didn't know they existed -- that's why I've got the ebook rights to "The Web Architect's Handbook" (1996) and "Toast" (2000). Odds are that there are no ebook editions because nobody's gone to the major butthurt of approaching the Estate to negotiate for them (given that there's no prospect of making any money there anyway).

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

These are not Kindle ebooks. They are Mobipocket. (There is no way I am buying a dedicated ebook platform at the moment. If I can't read it using free software on the Palm, I'm not interested -- see post for my general aversion to commercial ebooks.)

I'm not convinced it's OCR either. I think the ligature issue is sloppy conversion, and I am at a loss with the capitalised Ls. Having spent a few happy months proofing ebooks that *were*, often, OCR'd, I have become familiar with typical errors -- they are much more likely to substitute an 'h' for a scanned, ligatured 'fi'.

Re Burgess -- I'm positive it's because of lack of ebook rights, and that's commercially credible. But it does mean that someone like me who buys and reads a lot of older fiction is unlikely to have their book needs served by the current ebook market.

[reddragdiva]

Piracy, The Better Choice(tm).

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. If I could have found a copy of the texts online I'd have rolled my own and taken responsibility for the quality.

[asynje.livejournal.com]

The licenses on ebooks are insane. As is the lack of a common standard.

:(

It makes my inner librarian sad.