Not impressed with Amazon Kindle ST book! Are they all like this?!

[bfollowell]

I have a question for anyone that may be able to answer. Where the heck does Amazon get their Star Trek ebooks and are they actually proof-read or just typed in by low-paid monkeys and shoveled out the door?!

Let me elaborate.

I finally picked up the most recent Star Trek: Vanguard novel, Precipice, and am not the least bit impressed. I'll be honest; this is my first Amazon Kindle ebook purchase. I've been reading a ton of stuff I've purchased over the years in Microsoft Reader format and converted myself using Calbre and this is the first time I've actually gotten around to purchasing a real-live Amazon Kindle ebook.

First of all, there is no table of contents at all. Not a huge deal but just very strange. I thought that was supposed to be pretty much a standard thing with ebooks. The cover is all out of aspect, stretched, fat and ugly. At the end of the paper book, there's a page with large text stating The Saga of Star Trek Vanguard Will Continue. At the end of my ebook, there's also a page with large text. It states, and I quote "The Saga of STAR TRACK OF VANGUARD Will Continue". Who the heck puts these things together for them?! This looks awful and totally unprofessional. If I were Simon and Schuster or Amazon, I'd be totally ashamed to have my name attached to this mess. It really makes me wonder what I'm going to find inside once I actually start reading the book.

Is this common? Am I being too picky? Have any of the rest of you run into things like this before? How about anyone else that has Precipice on their Nook or Sony or some other reader? Did you have similar issues with this title?

Thanks.

- Byron Followell

 

[Smitty]

Who knows where they originate. As for other ST books, I am reading Destiny on my Kindle (Book 1 completed, and about 25% into second) and they have TOC and cover art is proper. I also have Precipice (have not read yet) and I check out what you said. There is no TOC but the art looks ok to me?

 

[bfollowell]

I guess there's a chance yours has a different cover image than mine but if you'll look at this side-by-side comparsion, I think you'll see the difference.

The image on the left is from my recently purchased Amazon Kindle version (and the version I suspect is on yours as well) and the image on the right is the image with the correct aspect ratio. As you can see, the one on the right has dimensions more like that of the physical book, as they should be.

Many people may not even notice but then again, many people swear they can't tell the difference when they're watching old SD television shows stretched to fit an HD screen. To those of us sensitive to such things, it is painly obvious.

I like things to appear as they were meant to appear; not to be flattened or stretched to fit some incorrect aspect ratio.

- Byron

 

[reech]

Amazon will refund badly formatted Kindle books; just contact them through the normal returns method on your amazon account, and soberly and politely point out that you wouldn't put up with poor typesetting, mispelt words, missing pages, etc in a physical book, much less an electronic one.

 

[bfollowell]

Well, even though, like someone on here mentioned, this file probably came like this from the publisher, Amazon made it right. I just called their customer service department and they apologized and offered to refund my money or I could keep the ebook and they'd give me a credit towards future ebook purchases. I decided to take them up on the credit. There's a reason I've been doing business with this company for over thirteen years. As upset as I am about the horrible formatting of this particular title, I really can't fault Amazon for it and have nothing but praise for the way they handled it.

Kudos to Amazon. A loudly blown raspberry to Simon and Schuster or whoever hacked this book together for them.

- Byron

 

[Thrawn]

Amazon does have incredible customer service.

 

[JD]

I'm glad to here that they do. I've never really had problems and needed to deal with them, but I'm glad to hear they're good. A lot of companies like them are a nightmare to deal with.

 

[bfollowell]

Yes, you have seven days to get a refund/credit on an ebook so, even if you buy a book and don't plan on reading it for a while, I'd go ahead and look through it enough to see if there are any issues that would cause you to want to pursue that.

- Byron