I purchased an e-Book from Amazon, a book by a writer I know, a book I was very much looking forward to reading on the long plane flight to presently un-oiled Florida. I wasn’t disappointed that the Kindle could not display the stunning cover art in color. I wasn’t disappointed that I couldn’t ruffle through the pages, couldn’t feel them flip against my fingers as I fidgeted, waiting for permission to use my approved electronic device once we attained cruising altitude. I’ve had a Kindle for years and I expected this.
No, what has my blood boiling is the totally inexcusable formatting of the book itself. There are two line feeds between paragraphs!
Now, you might say, or whoever is responsible for this abomination might say, “Get over it, chum. All the words are there”. Sure they are, and none of the art, or the flow, or what the author intended.
We use white space to signal a change of scene, a temporal change, or some other discontinuity in the narrative. Imagine an entire book, cut up and parceled out, as if each individual paragraph were the end of a scene. I didn’t realize just how ingrained the meaning of this white space was in my mind until I tried to read this book. The writing is very fine, I will buy a copy of the book in paper format so I can read it, but by God, I shouldn’t have to.
I have well over a hundred paid-for e-Books in my Amazon account, books from major publishing houses. I tell you that the formatting and copy editing of e-Books for Kindle is an embarrassment. No decent person, let alone a business person that actually wanted repeat business, would put out such shoddy work. These are books from major publishers, books that have been electronically edited and set, not scanned-in conversions of ancient out-of-print books where optical character conversion issues might be blamed. Books that real businesses wish to exchange for my money.
A few typos? I might accept that. I’m used to copy editing on the screen and am hyper-sensitive to such errors there. It could be that the printed versions have these errors and I would miss them. However, a recent science fiction book I purchased used upper case to indicate that a computer was ’speaking’. Did the publisher get this right? NO ThEy dID nOT. It was inconsistently wrong, so wrong, in fact, that it is impossible for any human capable of reading English not to have noticed. Irritating, to say the least. But an entire book of double line feeds between paragraphs?
Correction: Almost the entire book. The copyright notice is formatted correctly.
A reasonable person could argue that this e-Book could not have been tested for my device. Fair enough. I have the instantaneously obsolete original Kindle, a Kindle 2, Kindle for Mac, Kindle for iPhone, and the DX. Surely you can guess the results. Only the original Kindle’s markup capabilities are different enough to affect the display. But they don’t.
Well, says the hacker deep inside, just change the file yourself, you know, global search and replace. How hard can it be?
Impossible. That’s how hard, unless I want to become a copyright violator and troll the web for digital rights management removal software. And I don’t. Ever. And neither should you, says the writer.
This isn’t a blast against Amazon, or the Kindle, or against DRM, or against print publishers. I still buy paper books, and I pre-order hardcover editions from the authors I like. I love books in all formats, and I appreciate and understand the challenge of getting them right. But I won’t buy another e-Book without previewing it first.
Here’s the thing. I’m not an early adopter when it comes to e-Books. I’m a reluctant user, a mainstream target market customer for books that happens to travel. A lot. I couldn’t fit all the books I read on a typical trip into a suitcase, let alone a carry-on. Hence the e-Reader, whether it’s Kindle or iPad, or Nook, or Cranny, or whatever else comes out. I’m a traditional publishing house’s best customer. And I’m not satisfied.
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Maybe I’ll see what else is out there.
