Firstly this article is a defence of ‘formatting’ issues only. Yet the vast majority of complaints are about appalling and unacceptable editing and typos. So from the start it is a completely different issue from the one that most complaints hereabouts have centred on.

As Jack, DD and Erik have clarifies the biggest problem is with the obsession with control, a quite amateurish approach to testing and an ingrained shirking of responsibility.

Clearly there are problems with layout and formatting of works with non standard text and images. But the attitude that it’s all someone else’s fault and when customers get below standard product for their money, they should blame someone other than the publisher – is completely unacceptable.

When you offer something to the public that is sub standard is is your fault. if you cannot create an adequate standard then do not offer it for sale until you can solve your problem. Take responsibility and stop trying to pass it off to everyone else in the vicinity.

And yes, some of the meatgrinders such as Smashwords do a really poor job at converting your source into multiple formats. But, If you are able to directly upload your eBook like you can with B&N, there is no reason for it to look bad.

I was looking at the latest Star Trek eBook from Simon & Schuster and the ePub is dreadful. The CSS is a mess. They have no idea how to embed fonts. The code for all o that is a nightmare. Because they botched the embedded fonts, they caused the CSS not to actually work properly in ADE. And because of this, the ePub looks very poor. This is an example of how not to do things. It’s like they just exported the document and didn’t bother to look at it.

I thought at first that it was a joke. How do you want to churn out a decent work in that condition?

It would be like Toyota engineers admitting that they don’t test drive theirs cars, they just drive bikes and just ask their sons/relatives when they need feedback(admittedly it’s also seem possible given the recent news).

Although, as Felix Torres points out, ain’t no format issue leads to ‘spall chick poor blames’…

They also give idiots the ability (after great effort, thankfully) to make the ebook look “beautifully formatted” for the single case he thinks is the best, and absolutely unreadable for everyone else. Thereby hangs the complaint.

Regards,
Jack Tingle

A couple of author friends of mine actually run a home Sharepoint server they configured themselves to host their various short stories and novels-in-progress to take advantage of its versioning, revision-tracking, and backup features.

By contrast, several comments I’ve seen around here about how the BPHs manage their documents internally (PC-to-PC ftp and sneakernet) makes it clear their business model isn’t the only part of their operation stuck in the wrong century.

Odds are those folks have never even heard of Deming…

Standardization of ebooks is in the publishing industry’s hands. If they can’t manage it, and if they can’t streamline their workflow so production of an accurate, simple ebook doesn’t come almost automatically, some of them deserve to go out of business. I’m beginning to suspect publishing is overproducing, leading to low margins and poor quality. That way lies madness.

Regards,
Jack Tingle

The second problem is that huge amounts of eBook code, especially in the ePub format, is used by the creation application to circumvent the automatic controls built into the specification and the devices. The most common that I’ve seen is the use of the “p” tag and a “class” to define every element. We want our eBooks to be read and appreciated by live human beings, but we have to realize that in the world of eBooks a machine has to read them first. If we circumvent the codes the machine uses to display content, then it can’t render it properly.

The third area is the fundamental understanding of design and the designer’s responsibility when it comes to eBooks. It is a new era. We can no longer design books knowing the exact size of the finished work. It might be less than 2″ wide, or it might be viewed on a 20″ desktop. The reader might be inches away from the content or feet away. There is no way possible for designers to create a “hard” design for every possible set of viewing circumstances. It was so easy when we knew the book would be a 6×9 trade paper. Now it could be any size. This requires a whole new understanding of design in a world that holds anything static as anathema. Designers aren’t being prepared to design for this world.

There is a shared responsibility for the look of eBooks on the part of device/software makers, designers, and publishers. It may seem impossible, but we made it through the conversion from hot lead to cold type to desktop publishing and good design survived. It will survive this one as well.

Seems to me it’s time for the e-book distributors to join the 21st century and figure out a way to accept files already vetted. That meatgrinder operation sounds ridiculous, and frustrating.

Much of it comes back to the old DRM nonsense. If readers had the ability to manipulate the files to adjust to their readers, they’d be a lot happier, and the publishers would have a lot less work.

We live in a society where the author/publisher must recognize that the consumer is in control. The consumer wants to read their content on their device in their way. Limiting the customers options will limit the exposure of the written word.

Plain text has a low viscosity, throw some figures in there and the viscosity (ability to nicely flow onto the pages) increases dramatically. The industry is in dire need of a set of tools, specifications (EPUB++) and rendering applications that can handle delivering complex documents to a wide range of devices – phones, purpose built reading devices, large monitors, devices for the visually impaired, etc.

In fact, the bulk of ebook complaints I have and have seen online aren’t about presentation (except with PDF rendering and ePub hardwiring) but rather the quality of the *content*.

Ebooks are, first and foremost, about content.
The story.
The information.
Content quality is the publisher’s reponsibility. Editing, proofing, spell-checking, grammar checking, fact-checking (for content sold as non-fiction). Formatting might matter on print books but in the ebook arena, where errors can’t be blamed on faulty typesetting, the finger points straight to the publisher that allowed (often eggregious) content errors to flow straight to the consumer.

Yes, some apps have rendering issues.
And a lot of ebooks ship with poor formatting.
A lot of the better reader apps let the reader override the formatting to compensate for this poor formatting. But no app can fix a poorly proofed book full of grammatical errors or ocr errors. When you see complaints about ebook “quality”, odds are that 60-70% of the time the complaint is about document errors, not technology issues.

Blaming the reading app is like blaming the typesetter. (“Sorry. Itt happens. Its out of our control.”) Old hat. Except there is no typesetter to be the fall guy here and it is *easy* for consumers to verify if and when an issue is caused by the reading app and when it is caused by the ebook. Apps don’t transpose characters or paragraphs, apps don’t substitute the wrong homonym on the fly. Apps don’t mess us content. And way too many ebooks sold come with low quality content.

Blaming the reading apps can be seen as a smokescreen and an effort to actually carrying out a *core* function that properly belongs to the publishers.

At this point in time, ebook buyers are a little too tech savvy to be distracted by those kinds of excuses. Not at a time that the big publishers are flexing their oligopolistic power to raise prices and limit competition.

Forewarned is forearmed: ebooks are no longer going solely to enthusiasts and early adopters who are (somewhat) foregiving, they are going to consumers. We live in a consumerist society and consumers are all too willing to scream bloody murder and demand satisfaction.

High price + low quality = low value in anyone’s book, right?

High prices = high expectations, so the screams are only starting.

I still contend there are more basic typos and misspellings in ebooks. I’ve often wondered if the file that was uploaded for the ebook was actually a rough draft of the book.

Just this week I finished a book where the dog’s name was spelled three different ways and another where the famous female spy was referred to as “Mata Harry.” It happens so often that I’m starting to believe publishers are not putting as much effort into their ebook offerings.

Occasionally I buy an ebook that is beautifully formatted so I know it is possible. I recently bought a cookbook that was incredibly well formatted with crisp gray scale photographs, working links to purveyors of specialty ingredients, and an excellent table of contents with links to each chapter, sidebar, and recipe. Each recipe started at the top of a new page and the book’s cover fit into the Kindle screen perfectly.