Typos and formatting issues with e-books

[BsshBossh]

I love my Kindle and have read so many books on it but I've noticed far more typos and formating glitches in e-books than paper books. Is this my imagination or have you noticed too. Really spoils my enjoyment sometimes. I never noticed this in paper books so much (typos yes but not formating).

Yes, it's appalling! Basic editing seems to be a thing of the past. It is actually a refreshing change to read a book that doesn't have spelling and grammar mistakes.

I use Kindle on my iPhone and if I use the night mode, the top two lines are often missing. Very annoying.

What kind of formating problems do you mean though?

Yes, formatting v. annoying in all sorts of books. I'm an editor/proofreader, so even more annoying.

Not sure tho why this is happening with typos, because in theory they would use the same 'final' file that the printers print from.

But remember the publishers have had to get up to speed v. quickly on these (Amazon obv. make them do all the work).

Formating in The Three Weissmans of Westport, for example, had dialogue from three different people on the same line, also random R and S all over the place. In other books I've seen paragraphs split mid-sentence. They need proofreaders just for digital editions. It makes reading e-books a very poor experience, especially because I notice errors.

Ah yes, many a book I've given up on as they have jumped from person to person. One was written in the first person for more than one character. Luckily, it was a free download but that's not an excuse as it was in the Kindle store and not on some forum for self published reads.

The standard is definitely dropping. That's quite sad really. I wouldn't consider my use of English to be very good but I'm not writing books to torture other people with.

I agree that this is happening, but I was also surprised, when helping a friend, to see how difficult it is to get books published for kindle. You need to do an awful lot of reformatting. It is not just a question of uploading your word file. I am not surprise things go wrong for people who are not highly computer literate.

Yes, but the books I'm talking about are from major publishing houses who, you'd think, had the resources and marketing sense to ensure their digital output was as high a quality as could be.

It is really, really, really easy to self-publish just on Amazon kindle. They even have a step by step guide about how to format it and where to find the right drop down boxes. With no upfront fees at all if you don't get an ISBN, lots and lots of people are self publishing. Not all of them use a spellchecker.

I think that it is something that people will become more aware of as the ebook becomes more established and widely read.