Giles Diggle on Twitter @50oakwoods

Thursday 22 March 2012

ebooks: lazy ways & easy money - why proofreading matters

Have you ever read an ebook on Kindle that doesn't have some formatting problems: spacing errors, randomly indented paragraphs, typos? I haven't.

I am not just talking about the free out of copyright classics, but recently published novels like David Guterson's Ed King, (Bloomsbury pub.) which I am enjoying. Fortunately I bought it on the Kindle Deal of the Day promotion for £0.99. At the current price of £5.00 I'd feel less charitable about the formatting errors (of course it could be a problem with my particular Kindle Keyboard 3, bought in 2011.) You wouldn't accept a printed book in this condition, so why do we have to put up with imperfect ebooks?

Formatting an ebook is not an easy option, as I am finding with Badgerman & Bogwitch. It is straightforward to convert the file from a Scrivener document. It took less than thirty seconds. It is only when you look closely at the .mobi (Kindle format) or epub file that you come across formatting errors, that have to be painstakingly corrected by going back to the original word processor file. And much of this seems to be trial and error - it could take days!

If you publish an ebook you owe it to your readers to get it right.


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