ebooks—the good, the bad, and the ugly

[antiloquax]

It will be interesting to see the impact that e-reading has on reading habits. I've heard that more people read erotica in public now as no-one can tell what book you are reading by looking at the back of your phone/e-reader. I'm not sure whether having access to a lot of free e-books will make me read more, but it will probably enable me to have more choice. A friend of mine who has a contact in publishing has just given me some data dvds with about 14 gigs of ebooks on it (thousands of books). I've now got instant free access to a huge range of books. So, for instance, instead of wondering which PKD title to buy next - now I have almost all of them as e-books and I can just work my way through them!
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[nickpeirson]

Setting the price must be a complex thing, as there is no longer a physical book. No lumberjacks, trucks, paper mills, printers, and distributors on the overhead—no "brick and mortar" store! But there is some cost in maintaining e-sales servers and associated equipment and staff.

If you go through one of the distributors, such as as the Kindle store, then you don't have any ongoing server overheads as they take care of it. You do however encounter their strict pricing model. Kindle, for example, have price bands that attract different royalty rates, which gives an incentive to keep the price within the price band that attracts the highest rate of royalties. As you say, the pricing a digital book has some different considerations from a traditionally printed book.

The actual page layout should be the same as it's been for the last decade or so. Anything published within the last handful of years should be ready for e-publishing with virtually no effort at all.

Having the manuscript in a digital format for print does make it easier to transfer to ebook, but it's not completely straight forward. For instance, you can change the text size on a Kindle, which moves all the page breaks, not to mention that Kindle software is available for different platforms with different screen sizes. This means that page breaks have to come out to allow the reader to reflow the text as required, except for new chapters, separation of front and back matter, etc. Then there's specific mark up for formatting, which is different to the mark up for sending to a printer. I would expect commercial publishers to have a process in place to automate this, however as a part time publisher of an indie author, I know that even automation (some exporting, a few shell scripts ) only gets you so far and that there needs to be careful proof reading before the final copy is ready.

A big seller like Amazon really should focus on this because content is what they sell. The physical Kindle sales are probably negligible to their bottom line.

Amazon in particular are very conscious of this. If you download a badly formatted book, ask for a refund within seven days and you'll get it. Lots of refund requests and the book will be removed from sale and the publisher will be told to sort it out. I've only had one copy be refunded from the Kindle store, and I look after two books on there with a third to be arriving soon. If I can do a good job of formatting in my spare time, there's no excuse for commercial publishers not to! If you get a poorly formatted book, a refund request is a good way to feedback to the publisher.

 

[soulsinging]

Incidentally, the above mentioned The Star Kings was yet another commercial release with a good shovel full of OCR errors. I wrote to the publisher and volunteered my services—as a labor of love— to correct this old classic. I was very pleased that the editor welcomed my help, and I have already submitted a cleaned manuscript. The submission was only a couple days ago, so don't expect the corrections right away if you run out and buy a copy.

If you find a beloved old classic in less than proper condition, write to the publisher! The sci-fi author I assisted requested lists of errata, which he would correct himself, while the Star Kings publisher was sent a complete manuscript with corrections. If I were a publisher, I might worry that some smart aleck did nasty things to the manuscript, so procedures may vary. (Yes, there are apps that can compare changes in two documents, but ask the publisher how they want to do it.)

Sounds like they're not bothering to do these checks because they've got people willing to do them for free for them. Why pay someone up front when you can use readers as beta testers the way video games do? No need to provide a final product when you know your consumer will buy it regardless and you can let them do the legwork on discovering bugs for you?

 

[Devil's Advocate]

I guess I've been lucky, as I haven't really encountered any egregious errors in my ebooks. Although admittedly, the ebooks I've bought have tended to be fairly recent novels and so didn't have to go through the OCR cycle.

But I've definitely heard that the older books can have several errors. Over on another forum a user was complaining about how many errors his copy of The Lord of the Rings had, ranging from lack of capitalization (éomer instead of Éomer, for example) and spelling errors ('counsel lors') to words that are all but missing ('Go H' when the text should be 'Go Háma').

Usually, the publishers will correct those over time (if they've had enough complaints, I suppose). But I suppose they can be annoying.