The Reading Vent & Rant Thread

[DNSB]

For real fun, I looked at a couple of books that were converted from FB2 to ePub. The conversion program did not convert the images from Base64 encoding to jpg or other image format. This results in books that had massive page and word counts.

[Karellen]

Originally Posted by graycyn

I just read the latest Galbraith (J. K. Rowling) The Ink Black Heart and I was unduly irritated by double columns of tiny print chat room conversations.

The crazy bit was that these conversations were then repeated at a normal font size in a single column. These conversations were frequent and could go on for pages, so it wasn't just a once and done aggravation.

Naturally, once I discovered a normal single column version existed directly following the unreadable version, I paged on past.

But why, oh, why would any SANE ebook publisher do this? Why have it formatted in a way that's going to be positively impossible to read on most ereaders when it was obviously possible to format it in a readable manner? Why have BOTH versions present?

Although what I read was a library epub, I went over to Amazon just to see if any reviews mentioned this. A lot of people were irritated with the Kindle formatting and unreadable chats.

It just boggled my mind!

Oh, geez. I just started reading this. Reached chapter 5 and thought WTF, why are these conversations doubled???

Everything you say I either experienced or thought exactly the same way.

And what annoys me even more- this is one of those very rare occasions I chose not to do my usual recoding of the epub, because 1. I didn't feel like redoing the code for 129 images and the book is massive and would have taken considerable time, 2. It's JK Rowling, who has funds coming out of the wazzoo, so I expected a top notch job and 3. I wanted to get stuck straight into the story which picks up immediately from the previous book.

What a mess, now that I am looking through the code!!!

[rkomar]

The images depict the order in which the individual messages were posted, which you don't get from the single column text afterwards. There is a lot of information in that, and it was lost in the text-only version that followed. Clearly, the publisher couldn't think of a better way of doing it in an ebook. I was a bit irked at first, but realized that they at least made sure that no information was lost. So, although it wasn't ideal, I was mollified that they at least thought things through and gave me a chance to fully understand what was happening in the chats.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Karellen

Oh, geez. I just started reading this. Reached chapter 5 and thought WTF, why are these conversations doubled???

Everything you say I either experienced or thought exactly the same way.

And what annoys me even more- this is one of those very rare occasions I chose not to do my usual recoding of the epub, because 1. I didn't feel like redoing the code for 129 images and the book is massive and would have taken considerable time, 2. It's JK Rowling, who has funds coming out of the wazzoo, so I expected a top notch job and 3. I wanted to get stuck straight into the story which picks up immediately from the previous book.

What a mess, now that I am looking through the code!!!

If's a Cameron Strike book and yes it is annoying. I have two versions of this book. One with the images showing and one with the text showing instead of the images. I've not yet read it as I have not read the previous book.

[John F]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

If's a Cameron Strike book ...

AKA, Cormoran.