Why publishers format ebooks differently than paper books?

[greenapple]

I have bought a number of ebooks from both kindle and kobo stores over time. I've found that over 80% (at least) of ebooks aren't formatted the way paper books are usually formatted. On ebooks, the frequent issues are:

1) redundant blank lines between paragraphs,
2) very, very small indentations, or very, very wide indentations for first sentences of paragrahs,
3) totally no indentations for paragraphs, which makes the ebook read like an online document.

Does anyone find these poor ebook formatting decisions greatly affect his enjoyment of books the way I do? Why don't publishers agree on a standard?

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by greenapple

Does anyone find these poor ebook formatting decisions greatly affect his enjoyment of books the way I do?

They would annoy me if I couldn't fix them easily. The three you mention are quite simple to fix, usually requiring only minor changes to the book's stylesheet. I find the frequent spelling mistakes in ebooks a lot more annoying.

[cromag]

Agreed. Everything I buy goes through Calibre. That takes care of most of the problems. Also, I've tweaked some of the parameters so the file looks that much better.

I have run into an occasional ebook that has problems that appear to need more than Calibre to fix them, but that generally indicates an incompetent job, not sloppy formatting.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by greenapple

I have bought a number of ebooks from both kindle and kobo stores over time. I've found that over 80% (at least) of ebooks aren't formatted the way paper books are usually formatted. On ebooks, the frequent issues are:

1) redundant blank lines between paragraphs,
2) very, very small indentations, or very, very wide indentations for first sentences of paragrahs,
3) totally no indentations for paragraphs, which makes the ebook read like an online document.

Does anyone find these poor ebook formatting decisions greatly affect his enjoyment of books the way I do? Why don't publishers agree on a standard?

Greenapple:

And which of the million or so self-publishers, publishing books that look like that, do you think are going to get together and agree on how to do this consistently? The larger problem, as I see it (as the owner of a professional formatting company) is that most of the authors self-publishing today don't read the Style Guidelines put forth by all the retailers, Amazon and Kobo included, and don't understand, having grown up reading web documents, that unindented paragraphs are hard to read for long narrative passages. Most don't seem to care; I find many, many badly formatted books on Amazon. I simply pass them by, as I'm certainly not going to reformat a book I buy. I know a lot of MR'ers do that, but that is never going to happen with me.

Amazon, Kobo and B&N all have formatting guidelines, in which they request a certain consistency from the publishers, which are pretty thoroughly ignored. The problems you mention, e.g., indent size, are pretty common, as many people simply upload Word files that they've styled ad hoc, so you're seeing the default results. The extraneous blank lines? Self-pubs who hit "enter" twice at the end of every paragraph, and don't know any better, and don't remove those extraneous lines when they publish. And, I already spoke about the block-paragraph style. At my shop, we pretty soundly try to get our clients to not ever use block paragraphs unless there's a very real formatting purpose, due to exhibits, charts, etc.

And lastly, something that of course is near and dear to my own heart, many self-pubs don't want to pay for professional formatting, or worse, think that paying someone to clean up a Word file is formatting. (They tend to get that impression from Smashwords, in my experience.) I see them all the time on the KDP forums, where a newbie will ask about professional formatting and the "old-time" authors will sternly warn them not to pay more than $25 or $50 for formatting. Are there firms out there that will work for that kind of money? Yes, but most of them simply take the Word file, clean it somewhat, and then feed it to the KDP and call that a "formatted book," if they even give the client a mobi at all. There's a huge difference between "conversion" and "formatting" and unfortunately, that distinction is pretty much obliterated in the rampant disinformation around the Net, particularly around self-publishing, which seems to positively teem with utterly incorrect information on a constant basis. </rant>

I know what you mean about consistency, but I'd recommend that you simply look at the LITB or the free samples and find out before you buy if the formatting is something you can live with, or not. That's what I do (and, of course, the content!). I certainly would never--never--pay actual money for any book that looks like it was formatted by a deranged 4th-grader on crack. But then again, that's just me.

Hitch

[Dopedangel]

Thats why I use coolreader on my nook touch and android phone. Can disable the internal styles of the ebook. And can set the layout like I want works for most books so dont need to edit them or anything

[Rev. Bob]

I get frustrated at the publishers who think that for some insane reason, they need to set their standard font size to about 83% of default. I get even, though; I just modify the CSS to make the default about 120% of normal. That way, it cancels out their "make it smaller" code without breaking any relative font sizes (such as in headers).

One book I read late last year even had missing hyphens; I think the publisher took them out of the raw text when formatting for print. Thankfully, there was no DRM and I was able to go in and fix those errors...

[Catlady]

Why should an extra line between paragraphs be considered "wrong"? It is simply an alternate way of designating a new paragraph.

[DrNefario]

The formatting rarely bothers me at all. It's the words that are important.

I can see the advantages of not wasting space with blank lines, but I can live with it. The major formatting that issue that winds me up constantly is the idiotic handling of widows and orphans on my kobo which leaves massive gaps at the bottom of pages and makes you think it's the end of a chapter, and that's a kobo software issue not a book format issue. (My kobo is probably not up to date, I should add.)

[Purple Lady]

Originally Posted by Catlady

Why should an extra line between paragraphs be considered "wrong"? It is simply an alternate way of designating a new paragraph.

+1
I need blank lines between paragraphs or I tend to lose my place more easily.

[speakingtohe]

I prefer my books without indents and with blank lines between paragraphs. Just easier for me to read due to the smaller page/line width of most ereaders.

I used to think I was in a very small minority group, but now it seems that half the books I read are formatted this way to start out with.

I am not fanatical about it, often I will change the book, but if I find myself reading one that I haven't changed I just carry on usually. I do notice it often enough throughout the book that I can understand the irritation some might feel if they prefer otherwise.

I literally never noticed in paper books especially mass market. Didn't bother me one way or another which is good as no way to change them

I personally feel that the overall quality in ebooks has improved immensely in the 3+ years since I got an ereader. My first ebooks from the library had page numbers and page headings mid page and big old gaps following them and were only reflowable to a limited extent. Many (most) public domain books were butt ugly, some with weird typewriter fonts etc. Still more than a few like that, but I haven't encountered any recently.

Reading on a tablet, which I rarely do, I actually don't notice those pesky indents and lack of spaces. Strangely they irritate me on a desktop or laptop.

As for self published, most possibly do them according to their personal preferences, although I am pretty sure a few of them have rarely read a book let alone their own.

Helen

[Lemurion]

Originally Posted by Catlady

Why should an extra line between paragraphs be considered "wrong"? It is simply an alternate way of designating a new paragraph.

It's generally seen as wrong when combined with indented paragraphs. As a rule, you get one or the other.

The block paragraphs (no indents) and blank space system works, but it leads to problems with longer documents. If every paragraph has a space after it, it's hard to distinguish scene breaks unless there's a symbol that divides them. Indented paragraphs provide more flexibility because you can use spaces for something else, and they make it easier to tie paragraphs together as a unit.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

It's generally seen as wrong when combined with indented paragraphs. As a rule, you get one or the other.

The block paragraphs (no indents) and blank space system works, but it leads to problems with longer documents. If every paragraph has a space after it, it's hard to distinguish scene breaks unless there's a symbol that divides them. Indented paragraphs provide more flexibility because you can use spaces for something else, and they make it easier to tie paragraphs together as a unit.

Exactly. The idea of a blank line between paragraphs never even really appeared, in any recreational reading, prior to the advent of the web and the then-inability to create first-line indented paragraphs for reading. Only textbooks and that type of non-fiction material used white-space to indicate the change from one paragraph to another, primarily because said book would also include other formatting challenges (say, bulleted/numbered lists, charts, tables) that would look peculiar with the traditional first-line-indent paragraphy style.

I mean: just walk around your own bookshelves and pick up books at random and look at them. You will not, in fiction, see any--not one--that has white-space between paragraphs, or block-style. It's a massive waste of space (which is even more valuable on an e-reader) and increased printing costs. I've seen myriad complaints (and read them first-hand from people coming to us to "fix" books that they've self-pubbed) from readers with devices sending emails to Amazon, etc., about how much of their screen-space is wasted by block-style paragraphs for no reason. Smartphone and small tablet readers are particularly aggravated by this, it seems.

FWIW.
Hitch

[Ripplinger]

Like others, those little annoying things publishers do for whatever reason (I suspect they simply just don't know any better on how to provide a well-formatted ebook), I fix on my copy of the book. If I didn't do that, every sentence I'd read would be annoying, and I don't read to be annoyed.

I also don't want to see spaces between paragraphs. I've never yet picked up a book that had spacing like that.

I've scanned a few old books and I was very particular about sticking to the same formatting as was in the original book, from centered chapter titles and font size/style, to paragraph indents, on even the copyright pages. Yes, it's something that annoys me when I pay for a book that's poorly formatted.

[latepaul]

Originally Posted by Rev. Bob

One book I read late last year even had missing hyphens; I think the publisher took them out of the raw text when formatting for print.

Was it self-pubbed by any chance? A friend of mine was complaining on Facebook the other day that when he uploaded a word doc produced by OpenOffice, as opposed to Word itself, to KDP he lost all his hyphens.

[Purple Lady]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Exactly. The idea of a blank line between paragraphs never even really appeared, in any recreational reading, prior to the advent of the web and the then-inability to create first-line indented paragraphs for reading. Only textbooks and that type of non-fiction material used white-space to indicate the change from one paragraph to another, primarily because said book would also include other formatting challenges (say, bulleted/numbered lists, charts, tables) that would look peculiar with the traditional first-line-indent paragraphy style.

I mean: just walk around your own bookshelves and pick up books at random and look at them. You will not, in fiction, see any--not one--that has white-space between paragraphs, or block-style. It's a massive waste of space (which is even more valuable on an e-reader) and increased printing costs. I've seen myriad complaints (and read them first-hand from people coming to us to "fix" books that they've self-pubbed) from readers with devices sending emails to Amazon, etc., about how much of their screen-space is wasted by block-style paragraphs for no reason. Smartphone and small tablet readers are particularly aggravated by this, it seems.

FWIW.
Hitch

Just because a paper book doesn't have spaces is not a reason an ebook shouldn't have them. That's the beauty of ebooks - you can have them presented to you the way you want. It seems like more people don't want them than do, but that's different than saying there should be no spaces because paper books don't have them.