Poor standards of formatting in e-books

Good article at http://www.lunascafe.org/2011/04/typography-is-about-reading-and-so-are.html about the poor standard of formatting in e-books.

I'm several weeks and several books into my Kindle experience now, and while I like it, I have been repeatedly disappointed with the quality of the texts. As the article points out, high-profile books from major publishers exhibit the same sort of mistakes as free books.

Broken hyphenation, badly-aligned quotations, orphaned captions or headings -- all these things pull me out of a book as I'm reading it. I find myself itching to get into the "code behind" the text and fix it.

Think this is going to improve?

One can only hope.

On those rare occasions that I review a Kindle book I always mention whether the book was well formatted and well edited. I do this to do my bit to encourage authors and publishers not to treat ebooks as poor relations and give them the consideration they deserve. And to give ebook readers the consideration they deserve.

>3 xenchu:. Me, too. For much the same reasons. Hold 'em accountable, I say!

Absolutely.

I'm tempted to write to the publishers as well.

Publishers read reviews, so...

This is an important topic and one that needs to be discussed in all circles and echelons of the book industry. I have noticed errors in typography in all manner of books on my Kindle (though surprisingly the self-pubbed ones happen to be better quality than the big pub books). So much of this is lack of education on the part of the e-book designers. It takes much more skill than many realize. And I'm well aware that big publishers no longer have the budgets to devote to proper e-book design. They are too busy staying afloat, because e-books are outclassing their paperbooks in regard to costs. That's another whole topic altogether.

I am actually in the process of learning how to create an e-book. My publisher will design my final e-book, but I'm learning along the way. It's a multi-step process. We're pulling it from the Word document, placing it into InDesign to create character and paragraph styles as well as graphical chapter titles because e-technology isn't sophisticated enough to handle specialty text, exporting it to epub, then fiddling with the html css class styles in a text editor like Sigil or Dreamweaver. Most authors and publishers didn't learn html in school. This is a new and complicated technology, and everyone is scrambling to catch up.

The most frustrating part in all of this is that there is no standard for formatting an e-book. Each e-reader--Nook, iPad, Kindle, the various android tablets--has different capabilities in terms of typography and each has it's own style guide and rules. I'm getting there, but there is still so much to learn. I suppose I now see both sides of the coin. I see that the reader's experience is the most important thing to consider, but I also see how the technology's shortcomings have been thwarting the author/publisher's desire to create that great experience for the reader.

Here's hoping that education and industry wide standards as well as upgrades come in and save the e-book's future.

~Cheri