we want electronic publishing to be clean & perfect, but print hadn’t gotten *that* figured out in 500 years of trying. best to just make sure that the text is usable and intelligible.

very important, though: images. if images and charts and graphs weren’t necessary to the books in which they appear, they wouldn’t be there. they take some effort to produce.

And then of course there’s the fact that most ebook formats (excluding PDF) are xhtml/CSS based, a set of complimentary protocols that were never intended for any usage even approaching print convention.

Publishers jump through the hoops to make it work — to varying results, as end users have seen — but as Paula said, it would have been lovely had developers consulted with publishers somewhere along the line to ensure there’d be no gap between print convention and digital display.

Add to that Amazon’s unreliable testing mechanism: most computers (on which their testing program runs) support way more character sets than the Kindle, so errors will get through no matter how many uninitiated publishers test and check their output on PCs.

Word of advice: if you’re supplying for Kindle, use the .prc trick rather than zipping .html. It works a lot better, we’ve found.

Typos are far more likely when the book hasn’t been professionally edited, which has become common since self publishing and small online publishing is relatively easy now.

I don’t think there is any one program that does a good formatting job (not that I know of for sure). A person has to put forth effort to tweak the formatting to get a good result. If it’s a professional big publisher book, I think they need to be putting forth the effort, they are certainly charging us enough money.

By the way, I have a small collection of well formatted free ebooks at the bottom of my web page, if you want to have a look. Working on a new addition currently.

An allied problem I’ve seen on the web is news items where the website publishes the page in one encoding (iso-8859-1 for example) but the contributing writer (maybe using WinWord on his MS-Windows PC) has one or more characters in win-1252 encoding. These are not consistent within the document, for example a straight apostrophe will show up, then there is the symbol for unreadable character at another place where an apostrophe should go, such as the ‘blackball’s’ example; or else there is only a space rather than the symbol. Most of the items listed as problems fall into this category.

The other kind (the inapproprate hyphens) might well be optional or ‘soft’ hyphens being translated as true of ‘hard’ hyphens — but it’s hard to judge, since Mr Jaroslovsky is writing as a layman without the necessary experience in OCR and word processing.

Poor formatting. Outrageous page display.

That’s a problem with the Kindle. I can create any CSS I want and mark up my XHTML any way I want and the rendering will still screw my work six ways from Sunday. However, I’ve learned that if I do the MOBI first (which will honor most of what you ask it to do), then use that file for the Kindle store, it works a lot better than a straight XHTML file.

I much prefer ebooks with real quotes, em-dashes and such. And what about foreign language characters? There are many English language texts that contain foreign words.

Agreed. I keep a chart printed out and handy. The proper diacritical marks make me think the publisher at least tried, even if there are still typos here and there.

Rob Preece had better learn fast about Unicode. We left US-ASCII behind two decades ago.

Tagged PDFs, which InDesign can natively create if you tick one box and leave it that way, generally solve the problem of exporting plain text and certain kinds of XML from PDF. So, Wiebe, the solution is better PDFs.

Indention of paragraphs is as simple as p+p { text-indent: 2em; /* or choose your own value */} in your CSS.

This is sort of what I sort of thought was going on. I have always called the PDF the enemy of ebooks.

Your can’t read a PDF on the Kindle without conversion and converted files are full of strange problems and errors. The Sony’s native support is also imperfect from what I’ve heard. The DX can read PDF files a bit better, but a lot of people are saying it is not as good as Kindle formatted ebooks. I don’t know about the Plastic Logic reader, but my guess is that reading a PDF on it will still be troublesome.

As ebooks are on the rise, maybe it is time for publishers to give up the PDF. Put it to rest with VHS, cassette tapes, and floppy disks. There needs to be one format, not only for all reading devices, but for publisher’s as well.

Whoever comes out with the software that will allow publishers to send a file to the printers or to an ebook from the same source document is going to put a stake into the heart of Adobe.

Formatting text is not easy at the best of times. When your source material is in a number of different formats and the target technology is opaque, good luck. Amazon could fix this problem by releasing the Kindle’s code, but I’m not holding my breath.