All of which requires a budget bigger than currently allocated, I presume. Until eBooks become financially viable for S&S, such a budget will remain a very low priority.
More Trek Novel Reprints!
- Thread starter shanejayell
- Start date
All of which requires a budget bigger than currently allocated, I presume. Until eBooks become financially viable for S&S, such a budget will remain a very low priority.
I belive I'm using the default settings on my Nook, and I still get all of the errors.
I don't think we should jump on JWolf too much. I've never read an ebook, but I'll take his word for it that there are sometimes glitches, that these glitches detract from the reading experience, and that it would be better if they were fixed.
What has people bristling, I suspect, is just that most of the solutions being proposed are easier said than done. Writers should just learn how to format ebooks, struggling publishers should hire more people and spend more time and money on quality control, writers should provide electronic files of books written umpteen years ago, etc.
As I keep saying, the bigger ebooks become, the more money will be spent producing them, and these problems will (hopefully) go away.
We're in state of transition. I'm not surprised there are some bumps.
What has people bristling, I suspect, is just that most of the solutions being proposed are easier said than done. Writers should just learn how to format ebooks, struggling publishers should hire more people and spend more time and money on quality control, writers should provide electronic files of books written umpteen years ago, etc.
As I keep saying, the bigger ebooks become, the more money will be spent producing them, and these problems will (hopefully) go away.
We're in state of transition. I'm not surprised there are some bumps.
I do agree that the errors in ebooks are annoying, but at the same time I also understand that ebooks are still a minor concern for the publisher. Until that changes we probably won't be seeing much change or improvement in ebooks. Luckily for us they are rising in popularity so it hopefully shouldn't take much longer for those changes to happen.
For me the appeal is ease of use, portability of books, and space saving. Thanks for my Nook, I can buy books without having to leave my house, I don't have to lug around huge 1000+ page books, and I have 20 books all at my fingertips without taking up more than a DVD case worth of storage space. I understand people like the feel of a paper book in their hands, but to me the advantages of the ebook reader beat that by a huge margin.
Well speaking for myself what I take issue with is that particular individuals presumption that the problems are easy to fix and that the only reason they aren't fixed is because those repsonsible either don't give a shit or are idiots.
I used to be equally judgemental until I came across a line in a book written by Charles Grodin, he was discussing some particularly harsh criticism of one of his movies,and how while he agreed that the finished product was not that great, that the critic was being rather unfair, and then he wrote, "No one sets out to make a bad movie."
Well this has informed my view of a great many things including this particular situation. Are errors jarring? Sure. Do the people responsible for making/fixing said errors like that they exist? Doubtful. Do they want them fixed? Of course. Does it gall them that sometimes larger realities, like deadlines, budgets etc prevent them from fixing them? I'd be willing to bet they do.
To act as if the mistakes got made, or have not been fixed because those involved either just don't care, or are too stupid to fix them is deeply disrespectful.
Agreed, plus add to that the comfort of knowing that I will never lose another book, also I find that I'm able to read faster with not having to turn pages etc.
My main reason for getting into ebooks is that I can enlarge the font to whatever size I want (within limits). With the larger font, I find it much easier to read, which makes reading faster and comprehension better. An added bonus is that it doesn't take 4 hands to read (one to hold the left half of the book, one to hold the right half of the book, another to hold the bookmark to mark where I am on the page, and yet another to turn the pages).
Re: ebook problems: I believe that the most flagrant errors (no "proper" cover, lack of scene change breaks, hyphens in the middle of words) are a more recent phenomenon. As was mentioned earlier in this thread or in another recent thread, these problems seem to have started around the time of the "Great Layoff"--the one that included Marco as one of its victims. Which means to me, if you want your ebooks fixed at S&S, wait for the economy to improve, then redownload from wherever you bought the ebook from orignally (assuming they allow that and they're still around); in the meantime, live with the errors. Or have S&S spend less on producing pbooks, and hence make both pbooks and ebooks problematic. (I wouldn't recommend the latter, though.)
When I read Seize the Fire I did not notice any section break errors or line spacing errors. The errors were all in the text. Some of these errors come from the process of making the eBook. I cannot speak for all errors as I don't have the pBook to compare. All of the errors I found could have been found in a single read before being released into the wild.
I cannot say if the new issues are budget related or not. I think not. I think the way they are making the eBooks is the problem. This is my guess.
Now, one of the constant errors is that the ePub edition has an embedded font. This font is not properly setup in the CSS to be used. All it would take is viewing the ePub in Adobe Digital Editions to see that it isn't displaying the correct font. This is why I think it's more a staff issue then a budget issue. It takes less then one minute to double click on the ePub file and see it in Adobe Digital Editions. Other errors lead me to believe that S&S is creating the eBooks from a PDF source. If I am correct, it's again, not a budget/economic issue. It's a staff issue. You see, what I am getting from the errors is that the process is wrong. Take a PDF, convert it, don't bother to look at the resulting file, and convert to other formats from that one with the errors.
As for eBooks in general, I have a Sony Reader PRS-650. I can store a lot of eBooks on it. It's light and the text on screen looks good. The battery lasts more then a week and that's good. When I am on vacation, I do not have to carry around a pile of books and I don't need to have multiple books with me in case I finish what I am currently reading. Also, eBooks do not take up so much room.
Now, one of the constant errors is that the ePub edition has an embedded font. This font is not properly setup in the CSS to be used. All it would take is viewing the ePub in Adobe Digital Editions to see that it isn't displaying the correct font. This is why I think it's more a staff issue then a budget issue. It takes less then one minute to double click on the ePub file and see it in Adobe Digital Editions. Other errors lead me to believe that S&S is creating the eBooks from a PDF source. If I am correct, it's again, not a budget/economic issue. It's a staff issue. You see, what I am getting from the errors is that the process is wrong. Take a PDF, convert it, don't bother to look at the resulting file, and convert to other formats from that one with the errors.
As for eBooks in general, I have a Sony Reader PRS-650. I can store a lot of eBooks on it. It's light and the text on screen looks good. The battery lasts more then a week and that's good. When I am on vacation, I do not have to carry around a pile of books and I don't need to have multiple books with me in case I finish what I am currently reading. Also, eBooks do not take up so much room.
I do love a devoted rant thread. For a different perspective on all this, generating electronic documents for publication is something that actually was my job for a while, and it was a fairly minor part of a broader job--minor, because it was comparatively quick and easy to do. Even a document hundreds of pages long wouldn't take more than a few hours to format, convert, bookmark, hyperlink, insert signatures and verify things like paragraph alignment, pagination, etc.--and I doubt Trek ebooks are bookmarked, hyperlinked, or require electronic signatures, which cuts down the nitty gritty a fair bit. If the format of an ebook is anything similar to the format of the published work (and why wouldn't be?), then the process should be largely automated. Regular screw-ups suggest, to me, that somebody is working with the wrong settings, which means they've been improperly trained (really, in the current corporate climate of ooh-scary-recession-be-our-slaves-or-face-eternal-unemploment, I imagine they probably dropped this task on a person or persons who are not specialists, already had a full-time docket and weren't instructed in the process). Also, if documents are going out in this condition, it means that after conversion nobody is checking the generated documents (at least not on multiple platforms), or if they are, can't be arsed to figure out what they're doing wrong and fix it. Either way, terribly unprofessional. If I'd been regularly sending out documents which the sort of problems I've read about in this thread, I'd have been fired, and with good cause. That these problems are recurring doesn't suggest the folk in charge particularly care about the quality of their output.
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
The very first MMPBs were called "penny dreadfuls" for two good reasons. They cost a penny each and they looked pretty dreadful.
^Actually the "dreadful" in penny dreadful was in reference to their lurid, lowbrow content. And I think it would be more accurate to call them early pulps than early MMPBs. The article linked above says they evolved into British comic magazines.
Okay, now you're just speaking in tongues . . .
(Don't mind me. I'm still suffering from post-traumatic tech support flashbacks. "It's very simple, Mr. Cox. All you need to do is defragmatize your hard drive, download a new operating system, register at our website, set up a wireless router, reverse the polarity of the neutron flow, and your new printer will work just fine. It's easy. Anyone can do it!")
^Greg, where's the "Any" key?
Have you seen the quality of the paper?
They were the forerunner of "mass market" for literature. Before that, you really only had the pamphlet. Wiki also mentions that "American dime novels were edited and rewritten for a British audience".
That's why they were called pulps -- because of the low-quality wood-pulp paper. "Dreadful" referred to the content, not the paper.
http://www.collectingbooksandmagazines.com/penny.html
And nicknames and colloquialisms often work because they have clever shades of meaning.
The climax, surely?