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!!!