Seperations in chapters

[dispatcher812]

Sorry if this is off topic but it has been bothering me for a while. In a book, during a chapter, you have several different plots going on at once to transition between them, there is a gap on the page or stars or something to tellthe reader that they are switching plots or topics. I have notice that in the Kindle you don't always see this obvious switch. Sometimes it goes in to the next like its a new paragraph; no gap at all. Then other times you will have a clear seperation. Does this mean I am missing some of the book?

 

[LightningStorm]

Based on what others have said about ebooks from S&S it appears the ones that do that are just poorly formatted.

 

[bfollowell]

With the demise of the Microsoft Reader format, the S&S Trek ebook formatting has gone downhill fast. S&S was an early and strong adopter of the Reader format and did great work. For the most part, they pretty much all had excellent formatting back then. When S&S dropped MSR and started going with epub and mobi, the formatting started getting bad. That's not to say there hasn't been the occasional half-way decent ebook since then but half-way decent is about the best I could say. There's been nothing I would really call good. Still, it's usually easy enough for me to cleanup myself so I do.

All that being said, S&S seems to try to follow the original formatting where they can. It just doesn't always come off all that well. For example, the asterisks are used only where the break falls at the beginning or end of a page. Since there aren't any "pages" in an ebook, these really serve no purpose and should probably be left out. Many Trek novels seem to leave a wide space and start the first paragraph of the new section with no indentation to show a new scene. This works well but there are quite a few examples where there is a small space but the first paragraph is indented. Depending on how wide the space is in the ebook, these breaks can be notoriously hard to see.

Typically, I edit all of my ebooks and widen the space between scenes to 3em so that they stand out better, but that's just me.

So, to answer your question, no, I don't think you're missing anything other than the scene-breaks and that likely isn't your fault at all.

- Byron

 

[JarodRussell]

Why they don't just take the damn file they print and turn it into a PDF is beyond me. Would have the exact same formatting of the physical book.

 

[ATimson]

Based on what others have said about ebooks from S&S it appears the ones that do that are just poorly formatted.

That would be exactly it.

For what it's worth, the newer books from S&S seem to be okay; it's mainly the older titles that are problems.

If you're buying in ePub, anything from before late 2009 has a chance of being problematic. Some books they did a clean conversion from the extant OEBPS versions; others they converted from some other format (probably PDF), with miserable results.

With Kindle, the break may be earlier; however, I just went and looked at a handful of samples, and the same books that were fine in their OEBPS versions but are crap in ePub were also crap on Kindle. So "late 2009" may not be so far off after all.

(Random note: in a printed book, if the break is in the middle of the page, it's a blank line. If the break is at the top/bottom of a page, that's when they use the stars, since otherwise it could be hard to determine if there was or wasn't a break. New-to-electronic titles like SCE usually use all stars, while other titles in electronic form usually mimic their print counterparts - stars for stars, blanks for blanks).

Why they don't just take the damn file they print and turn it into a PDF is beyond me. Would have the exact same formatting of the physical book.

They used to do that, but nobody bought PDFs because they're terrible for use on mobile devices. They might work better on modern eInk devices, but they still wouldn't be good reading experiences (no ability to change the font size, lots of unused space on the screen, etc.).

 

[Daddy Todd]

Why they don't just take the damn file they print and turn it into a PDF is beyond me. Would have the exact same formatting of the physical book.

Because a PDF is not an e-text, it's basically a picture of the pages.

One of the main reasons I'm getting into ebooks is because I can make the test bigger or smaller, until I find an ideal size for me.

I can "grow" and "shrink" the display of a PDF, but if I do, it will require me to scroll the page to see the end of each line, and that's really annoying.

S&S spent a lot of money through most of the last decade on ebooks, but apparently it didn't get the financial return on that investment it had hoped for. Now it seems they expend the absolute minimum possible in creating ebooks of new titles.

It's as if they laid off their entire ebook staff, and now have some office drone preparing the texts for Kindle and Nook, with little regard to their quality.

 

[JoeZhang]

This question keeps coming up and up (and you've more than likely summoned JWolf) - basically yes, S&S put out lousy ebooks and many people spend time reformatting books themselves so they read well.

 

[bfollowell]

This question keeps coming up and up (and you've more than likely summoned JWolf) - basically yes, S&S put out lousy ebooks and many people spend time reformatting books themselves so they read well.

Yes, I was worried about the same thing.

I've ranted on about S&S several times myself but it's never done any good and life is too short so I've tried to let it go. That's why I tried to not go too much into that in my post. I tried to be more matter-of-fact about the details.

Jon does seem to go on and on about S&S, their poor formatting and the agency selling model quite a lot. I certainly agree with him on some points. I've just decided that it's highly unlikely that us continuing to complain is going to have any effect and I don't want to turn everyone else off by being that S&S complainer, super-negative guy anymore.

dispatcher812, PM me if you want some tips on how to cleanup your ebooks. It's relatively easy and, depending on the condition of the ebook, isn't too awfully time consuming.

- Byron

 

[JoeZhang]

Jon does seem to go on and on about S&S, their poor formatting and the agency selling model quite a lot. I certainly agree with him on some points.

I don't disagree with any of his points but equally I don't suffer from a poor memory, so once I've read them once....

 

[ATimson]

dispatcher812, PM me if you want some tips on how to cleanup your ebooks. It's relatively easy and, depending on the condition of the ebook, isn't too awfully time consuming.

I assume that fixing the ePub of A Rock and a Hard Place (it has no quotation marks, apostrophes, emdashes, or characters with accent marks - basically, anything that's not standard ASCII got stripped) isn't something that would be "not too awfully time consuming"?

(I still have the MS Reader version I could go back to and convert from, instead of using S&S's ePub. But reading the book like that was an interesting experience, so I just plowed ahead. )

 

[bfollowell]

I assume that fixing the ePub of A Rock and a Hard Place (it has no quotation marks, apostrophes, emdashes, or characters with accent marks - basically, anything that's not standard ASCII got stripped) isn't something that would be "not too awfully time consuming"?

Correct! I would definitely consider that a little time consuming.

(I still have the MS Reader version I could go back to and convert from, instead of using S&S's ePub. But reading the book like that was an interesting experience, so I just plowed ahead. )

This is just me but I would never consider buying another version if I already owned the MSReader version of a Trek book. For the most part, those were some of the best formatted ebooks I've ever seen. That was back when S&S actually cared and spent money on their development. Also, those are some of the most easily converted ebooks there are. I have literally hundreds of Trek Reader ebooks that I've not read. It sort of got to a point of more buying and collecting than actually reading and enjoying. Now I'm working to convert them to epub for a little cleanup in Sigil and then a final conversion to mobi using Calibre so that I can finally read them on my Kindle. The whole process rarely takes over an hour for any particular ebook.

- Byron

 

[ATimson]

This is just me but I would never consider buying another version if I already owned the MSReader version of a Trek book.

Neither would I; however, prior purchases direct from S&S (in any format) got converted to ePubs in late 2009. Rather than do the conversions myself, I just grabbed them all. Some have been just fine (coincidentally, they generally were converted from - or at least used the OEBPS source files from - the MS Reader versions); others... *shudder*

Now I'm working to convert them to epub for a little cleanup in Sigil and then a final conversion to mobi using Calibre so that I can finally read them on my Kindle. The whole process rarely takes over an hour for any particular ebook.

Unless I knew a book needed significant cleanup, I'd skip the ePub/Sigil step; kindlegen can take the extracted OEBPS files that... the usual MS Reader extraction tool generates... as input without any changes. At one point (pre-ePub) I batch extracted all of my MS Reader files, wrote a batch file to convert them all, and let the computer fly.

 

[JWolf]

When S&S first went all ePub, they had some problems on their end with the DRM. So if you had an ePub direct from S&S with a DRM issue, the only thing you could do was wait for it to be fixed and it did take a good while for some eBooks.

Also, if you buy direct from S&S, there's actually almost no way to contact someone at S&S about a problem you may have like with Rock and a Hard Place mentioned above.

I do think S&S has an automated system going for making eBooks. This would be why the embedded font is broken in all of the Typhon Pact ePub. I'm guessing (unltil I have a look) that S&S is using the same CSS for all the ePub and once the error got in the first CSS, it just keeps going.

Some of the errors I am seeing in the text does make me think that there is a very good chance that S&S is using a PDF file as the source and converting from that. Fr example, in Seize the Fire, I see Star-Ship. I also have a couple of errors so far where the end quote is he wrong one so it's backwards. Also, where they sometimes have Doornail, we get “ ‘Doornail’” instead of “‘Doornail’” These are stupid errors that could have been found easily with a simple read.

I have marked the errors and when I am done reading the ePub, I will go in and make the corrections and if I ever reread, I'll not have to deal with these errors.

 

[Therin of Andor]

These are stupid errors that could have been found easily with a simple read.

As an editor of a professional journal for 4.5 years, I can tell you there are only ever so many errors that can be caught. Beyond spellcheckers, I used to get about three read-throughs as each article was being edited, then at least one more of the whole issue, catching many errors and oddities every time. Then it went to design and layout, returning as galley proofs for one more read-through, although any errors at that point had to be paid for separately, and could easily blow the budget. Sometimes the designer simply didn't notice the editing marks, and those were fixed for free - if I found them. There was always the risk that the final editing marks might get missed, or misunderstood, and if that happened there was really no chance (or budget, or time) for a second round of galleys. My two bosses - and their boss - also did read-throughs of the "final" version. They rarely found errors (because I'd already found most of them), but when the boxes of finished magazines arrived from the printers, you could flip open at any page and find something that could have been "easily" caught earlier.

 

[JWolf]

But if you look at the thread I started on the errors in Seize the Fire, it looks like it didn't even get one read through. The errors are ones I caught with only one read through. And some of them are errors that could be searched for in case there are the same errors in other places. I mean to have things like the wrong quote or star-ship or eco-sculptor. Just wrong. Just way too wrong.

Why is it Trek eBooks are going downhill in terms of quality? It's like they take a PDF source, convert it and say, "Right, that's it done'. Sloppy work with a high price.

 

[JD]

^It's kinda surprising, you'd think they'd put more emphasis on getting a high quality product out now they're getting more and more popular.

 

[JWolf]

^It's kinda surprising, you'd think they'd put more emphasis on getting a high quality product out now they're getting more and more popular.

http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=136681

Take a look at that thread and you'll see a load of errors in the Seize the Fire ePub edition. I do not know how many of those errors are in the pBook or the Kindle version. But if anyone would like to compare, please let us know.

It is sad how S&S's Star trek eBook quality has gone downhill. It seems that since Marco left that the quality isn't as good. And a lot of the errors are just stupid errors. And why bother to embed a font in the ePub when you don't have the proper code to actually use it?

 

[JWolf]

Re: Separations in chapters

^It's kinda surprising, you'd think they'd put more emphasis on getting a high quality product out now they're getting more and more popular.

http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=136681

Take a look at that thread and you'll see a load of errors in the Seize the Fire ePub edition. I do not know how many of those errors are in the pBook or the Kindle version. But if anyone would like to compare, please let us know.

It is sad how S&S's Star trek eBook quality has gone downhill. It seems that since Marco left that the quality isn't as good. And a lot of the errors are just stupid errors. And why bother to embed a font in the ePub when you don't have the proper code to actually use it?

 

[Defcon]

It seems that since Marco left that the quality isn't as good.

Which probably has little to do with him leaving (as he has stated repeatedly in the past that he had no control over the technical side of the eBooks), but more with the fact that 34 (IIRC) other people lost their job at S&S as well on that day, which probably included eBook department personnel as well.

 

[JWolf]

It seems that since Marco left that the quality isn't as good.

Which probably has little to do with him leaving (as he has stated repeatedly in the past that he had no control over the technical side of the eBooks), but more with the fact that 34 (IIRC) other people lost their job at S&S as well on that day, which probably included eBook department personnel as well.

I'm not saying it has to do with Marco. I'm just stating it as the timeline for when Trek eBooks started having errors in them that never should have been in them. I could do a better job then the current staff. It's not hard really. Work with the author to get a good document to start with and go from there. But I'm guessing that S&S is using a PDF sourced original and that's where the errors are creeping in.