Take a look right below at Bolingbroke's comment and mine right below yours.
Yes, formatting something like a cookbook can be a problem. Also, scanning out-of-copyright books can sometimes cause problems because of unclear text.
But all the books I discussed were new -- or new enough. Too many publishers aren't taking the time and spending the money to copyedit and correct a book after it has been scanned.
By coincidence, there's an interesting article in the NY Times today about the challenge of transferring a substantial cookbook - Judith Childs' "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" - to an eBook format. This is two fat volumes of recipes, lists of ingredients, drawings and other illustrations, and I can appreciate the problems involved.
I have some sympathy with eBook publishers here; much less so with straightforward text.
Thanks for the link about the article on the eBook of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It highlights some of the problems of formatting older books.
However, the article didn't report whether there were many more additions to the eBook, such as videos. It doesn't compare, for example, with The Waste Land eBook.
Sorry, but I don't keep track of publishers with the worst eBook copyediting and formatting. I look at the names of publishers when I pick books, but my tiny brain doesn't remember which ones are the best and worst.
It's a good idea, though, to have a Hall of Fame as well as a Hall of Shame.
Alan, a step in the right direction for electronic publishing can be found in Alfred A. Knopf's release of the e-book edition of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" by Julia Childs. Reading an article in today's ( 10/5/2011 ) NYT, it apppears that a good deal of thought was put into the redesign of this product.
( I am always reluctant to include a link to the NYT pay site. )
Alan, have you noticed which publishers are the best of the worst? Aside from complaints, giving credit for trying could also move this problem forward.
Do you mean the iPad touch or the Kindle Touch? The Kindle Touch has X-Ray. As Amazon says:
For Kindle Touch, Amazon invented X-Ray - a new feature that lets customers explore the “bones of the book.” With a single tap, readers can see all the passages across a book that mention ideas, fictional characters, historical figures, places or topics that interest them, as well as more detailed descriptions from Wikipedia and Shelfari, Amazon’s community-powered encyclopedia for book lovers.
Amazon built X-Ray using its expertise in language processing and machine learning, access to significant storage and computing resources with Amazon S3 and EC2, and a deep library of book and character information. The vision is to have every important phrase in every book.
With Kindle apps on Android phones, for example, there's not only the dictionary, Wikipedia and Google but there's also a Shelfari option, although it's more convoluted. X-Ray on the Kindle Touch is probably quicker, and Jeff Bezos demonstrated it during the announcement.
X-Ray isn't on the $79 Kindle with WiFi, and I don't know whether it will be included on the Kindle Fire, although I'd be surprised if it weren't.
The new Kindle Touch allows readers to access not just dictionary definitions but all kinds of additional information about a book (characters, plot, themes, historical references etc), by... well, by touching it appropriately!
That's the kind of creativity eBooks are calling out for, even if Amazon is making the sad error of providing information from the utterly unreliable Wikipedia. But I'd also like them to get the text right as well.
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