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Falling out of love with my Kindle

31 replies

DuchessofMalfi · 16/08/2014 12:08

I love the convenience of my kindle, being able to buy books straightaway, no need to go out to the shops etc. However, what has annoyed me recently is the seemingly slapdash way in which books are converted to ebooks.

Two books I've read recently on my kindle have had glaring errors - spelling, grammar, even getting names wrong. It's annoying. I'm cross that I've spent money, maybe not as much as I would have done for a paperback, on a book that has not been proof-read properly or perhaps not at all.

The quality is disappointing. It should be the same standard as a paper book but it often isn't. I read Elizabeth Jane Howard's The Light Years last week (the first in her Cazalets series). I had it on my kindle, and also had a paperback copy as part of the set I bought after getting the ebook. There were too many errors in the ebook. I was fairly certain she would never have used the word "dude" either in her novels or in real life :o and yet there it was. On checking the paper book, it should have read "dear". Just one example of several errors.

Rivers of London by Ben Aarononovitch, as an ebook, is virtually unreadable - typos throughout and even names are wrong.

Has anyone else found glaring errors? What do you do about them? Do you complain to the ebook provider, try to get a refund? I don't know the best way forward - mass returns of erroneous books? Petitions for better quality? We need to take a stand :)

OP posts:
antimatter · 16/08/2014 14:30

you can return book in Kindle if you don't like it
I guess this is big advantage over buying the actual book

hackmum · 16/08/2014 14:26

Coddo, I'm not quite clear what your last post means (predictive text error, I'm guessing) but I think the way they do it is to scan the print version using optical character recognition and then go through correcting the errors - but often not very carefully. I was really struck by one Julian Barnes book I read on Kindle where the letter I and the letter l (lower case ell) sometimes got mixed up. That's usually a sure sign of OCR being used.

OwlCapone · 16/08/2014 14:24

I was going to say that I've read Rivers of London and it was absolutely fine. However, it turns out I read it on iBooks and not my Kindle.

I agree in general. I've read a few books lately and some have been truly dire. Do they not proof read them?

Coddo · 16/08/2014 14:18

I'd presume they just put the text from the authors original work on to alms kind of kindke format

Coddo · 16/08/2014 14:18

Surely thd errors exist in the text too?

hackmum · 16/08/2014 14:17

Yes, I've noticed this. It's not true of every book, just some books - you see really glaring errors of spelling or punctuation or the occasional missing word. And you know that it's not the fault of the original author, it's something that has happened in the transition from print to ebook.

I haven't done anything about it - possibly because I haven't come across anything quite as dreadful as your examples - but perhaps I should.