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Kindle pricing good, but K formatting can stink: Scribner treats Stephen King e-book like a country cousin
December 24, 2009 | 9:53 am
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By Paul Biba
Just how much does the Kindle edition of Stephen King’s Under the Dome sell for? See John Hagewood’s note below. I’m interested since I’ve preordered the book. Formatting issues also arise. I don’t care that much about cover art or a table of contents, but Scribner was tacky to omit them and give the impression that e-books are country cousins. The note:
I originally pre-ordered Stephen King’s “Under the Dome” Kindle edition for $9.99.
Cancelled that and pre-ordered again when price hit $7.99
Cancelled that and pre-ordered again (still at $7.99) when ASIN changed (and I got paranoid
got the book today on my Kindle….they charged me only $7.20: so I guess the “low-price guarantee” they advertise on other pre-orders DOES apply to Kindle books after all?
HERE IS THE KICKER: It has NO COVER ART and NO BLOODY TABLE OF CONTENTS.
How can a major book release like this have neither of these? How unprofessional is that?!?
Update I just checked my Amazon account and I was charged the low $7.20 price even though I never cancelled the original order.
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Comments:
Amazon ALWAYS honors the lowest selling price on any pre-ordered items. You don’t need to cancel a pre-order if you find that they have lowered the price later on.
I’m working through a paper copy of Under The Dome (from my library) – there’s no Table of Contents in the paper copy, either. So I don’t think that’s actually an omission from the E-Book, as it’s an omission from the book, generally.
Teel: But in an e-book, nav links tied to the TOC could be especially useful. A simple TOC would do.
Thanks,
David
Formatting of many publisher’s ebooks tends to be sloppy. I don’t think they even bother to run them through a spell-checker. I wish there was some facility to correct malformed ebooks, but unfortunately DRM prohibits me from doing that to my books.
Perhaps Amazon or the publishers themselves could set up a Web site on which formatting and spelling errors could be reported and eventually corrected. They could even reward the users with a small credit toward other ebooks.
@GJN
Very often they take the uncorrected proof (before typesetting) and use that to create the ebook.
That’s not in their best interest if you believe, as I do, that the point is to discourage ebook buying altogether by making them “country cousins.”
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In essence, formatting an ebook is an entirely different skillset from designing and typesetting a print book. If my theory about wanting to discourage ebooks is wrong, then either the people who do this don’t care to learn, or they don’t care to hire it out, or they don’t know there’s a problem (which, if they do, brings us back to not caring and why they might not care).
Formatting for the Kindle, especially, is nasty because it doesn’t honor many of the most common styles and tags. My process is to format it for MOBI/PRC and upload that file. It does a decent job (according to the preview, anyway), but even what Mobipocket will honor, sometimes Kindle won’t–and that’s its native format.
As for cover art, that’s embedded in the MOBI/PRC file I upload to Amazon, but I’m not sure how it displays. I have to take that on faith because I don’t have a Kindle. I’ve heard no complaints, thus far.
Finally, IMO, there is NO EXCUSE not to have a linked table of contents. None.
I have come to expect minor formatting errors such as broken words or odd spacing between whole words in ebooks.
However, I was very upset to see that the Kindle version of Andrew Sorkin’s book “Too Big to Fail” while having dozens of pages of footnotes not only did NOT have footnote links in the body of the text but the footnote numbers did not even appear in the text. They were just listed at the end of the book.
Talk about useless!!
I take issue with the sense of entitlement eBook readers seem to have. Not only should the price for a new 1k+page book be $9.99 (or less, apparently $7.20 in this case), which is less than a third of the hardback cover price, but the digital version should have MORE features? You want to pay less (a LOT less) and get more, or you’ll consider it “sloppy” and “unprofessional”?
I don’t consider giving kindle owners the SAME book contents at paper readers in any way shows the publisher making eBooks “country cousins,” or intentionally discouraging their use. But I don’t think SAME=LESS which is what you seem to be suggesting.
@HeavyG:
I understand that a footnotes/endnotes failure is a problem, at any price, and there isn’t a good excuse for the publisher not trying to figure out a way to solve it. That’s a case of the publisher actually giving LESS.
@Teel
I don’t think eBook readers are entitled at all for expecting professional quality ebooks they spent money on. I think publishers need to understand that people are pirating ebooks because with pirated ebooks you can create a Table of contents, fix badly formatted ebooks, and etc…
What’s the point of paying for an ebook if you can get a free one that’s better formatted?
I know I don’t like paying for something that looks like something a kid could have slapped together in one hour.
They aren’t treating ebooks with the same professionalism as paper books.
Mass paperbacks are cheaper than hardcovers and you don’t see them full of formatting errors.