Digital book pricing is all over the place, and different vendors have some books while others don’t, and sometimes when you find them, they’re so expensive you just give up and turn on the tv. Or maybe that’s just me.
But Marilyn wrote to me with a bigger problem: what happens when the ebook you buy is so horrible in its quality, so poorly completed that if it were paper, you’d return it?
She writes:
Would it help to write to certain publishers about excetionally poor proofreading in e-books? I recently purchased a 2-in-1 book and was stunned to see page after page of errors that looked as if they had been scanned in with a beta version of Omnipage and left without any proofreading. I would like my money back, or at least a newer, proof-read copy of the books.
This is the worst I have ever seen! It is Madeline Hunter’s By Arrangement and By Possession. It is virtually unreadable in its current form.
Here are a few of the more egregious errors:
die = the
ufe = life (multiple times)
ifour = if our
//1 = if
spht = sped
pxmishing = punishing(promising?)
co?TUption = corruption
pan = part
dissieised = ???(some middle english word with which I am unfamiliar)
aim = arm
hospilaUty = hospitality
sofdy = softly
J = I
/ = IAs you can see, there are many and they crop up on almost every page. I might have had an easier time reading this if it had been written in Edwardian English.
Is there any recourse?
My response: I don’t care if the terms and conditions state that ebooks are not returnable. If the book text looks like Elvish had dirty sex in a blender with Urdu and Basque and you paid for it, you should seek some form of return, at the very least for credit.
Unfortunately, there is little recourse with the publisher directly because it’s difficult to find a customer feedback response form on most publisher websites. You can always pen a polite email to the author asking whom she thinks might be the best person to address – but there’s little to say to the publisher. So many things can go wrong – someone didn’t proofread, but who was it that should have done the proofreading? If you’re asking me, the publisher is responsible, but who at the publishing house? As more out of print and older backlist books come back to life as digital scans, more of this type of text error will become more common.
I think you should contact the store you bought the ebook from, and advise them that due to the poor quality of the book, you would like to have a refund for your purchase. If that’s not granted, you can contest the charge on your credit card through your credit card company. Many if not most credit card purchases come with varying forms of consumer protection against poor or faulty quality. A few screen shots of “die hospilaUty / experienced in my ufe contrasted with the pxmishing co?TUption of my death” should make that hideously clear.
I heard back from Marilyn a few days after I sent her my response:
This is an update on your suggestion to contact the author and the seller about my experience with an extremely bad reading experience. I contacted Customer Service at Kindle/Amazon and explained the problem with the book.
This morning I received an email letting me know that they had fully refunded the price of the book and notified the publisher of the problem. I was astonished to say the least.
I would encourage all e-book readers not to suffer in silence. Hopefully enough refunds will eventually get through to the publishers of these below-standard books.Thank you for your suggestions.
Feel free to use my name in any mention of this experience.
One thing about Amazon and the Kindle, if you contact them with a problem with an ebook, and I have multiple times, they are very quick to respond with refunds.
So what else could be done besides seeking redress from the vendor where you purchased the book, or from the credit card you used to buy it? I have the following humble suggestion for the publishing industry:
Put the name of the copy editor, the editor, and the company who did the ebook conversion on the book itself.
I’m not kidding. Increased transparency=win. The copyright information on the book should not only include the names of the folks who designed the cover, who took the photographs, but also the names of the people who edited the book, who copy edited it, and what firm produced the ebook format conversions. Some publishers already tell you who edited a book – and that is most spiffy. But did you know that on many pirated ebooks, there’s a notation in the front as to which person (by user handle, not real name, of course) scanned the file, which person proofread it, and which person checked it for accuracy. It’s not like you can email SP1derzdanz13 and say, “Dude, you suck,” but more likely than not, the pirated copy with user names listed will be pristine in terms of quality when the same book from a publisher may not. Piracy flourishes, among other reasons, because the legitimate product is poor and the pirated version is better.
If you name names, there’s personal accountability for both the production side and the consumer side – and knowing that someone verified the accuracy of the digital file speaks volumes as to whether that product is valued by the entity producing it. It’s about time the author stopped taking heat for shitty looking ebooks – and well past time that readers knew who to whom they might address their complaints.
In the meantime, if you get a shitty ebook, ask for your money back. Complaining about the prices is one thing, and believe me, I do it. But the idea of paying higher prices for a complete absence of editing and proofreading? Oh, Hell No.
Any pricing model can kiss my ass if the publishing house can’t be bothered to run spellcheck before they publish a file. And I’ll put my name on that statement any time.
Negative, Ghostrider: Carina is DRM free.
It’s basically getting down to three formats now ePub, PDF (which is still surprisingly popular and which is needed for some text books and stuff) and Kindle/Mobi. Everything else would be a legacy format at this point (although there are still a lot of users for some of them like eReader).
Rock on. Then folks can just buy the epub and convert it to whatever they want in Calibre.
@ Brian. What Sarah said. Though some etailers add their own DRM, our files are provided DRM free and will be sold direct from the website DRM free.
I think you misunderstood my Kindle example though. What I was saying is that yes, we will be selling through Amazon but if we choose to sell only epub from the Carina site, because that’s the only format we convert to, then we’re basically telling all Kindle owners they have to buy our books at Amazon, not direct from us (where we’d make more $$) because Kindle owners couldn’t put an epub file onto their Kindle since Amazon hasn’t opened up their device to epub format. So they’d have to go to Amazon for a compatible file/to make their purchase.
All that as an explanation as to why publishers choose to do multiple formats, because we don’t want to drive sales to just one etailer!
Since it seems like some authors read this site, and we are talking about typos, I would like to pose a question:
If you were a writer who had a new website that was RIDDLED with spelling and grammar errors, would you want a reader to email you about it?
An author I like has a terrible website, the errors are all over the place. I’d like to mention it to her, because I don’t think it represents her well. I’m sure the site is outsourced and she doesn’t actually do the rotton spelling, but you think she might look at it every once in a while…
Or should I do a big butt-outski?
Of course they can. But will they? Some readers will, but other readers, those not immersed in the technology of it, will simply assume no format they need means they can’t read the book.
I hope you don’t think my explanations mean I don’t agree with you, because most of the presentations I give contain this point, that we need to think about what will make it easiest for the reader. My only purpose in commenting here is an explanation that it’s not always as easy as just saying “this is what should be done”. Sadly, it is rarely that easy!
Agreed!
YES.
Amanda – that’s a really good question. I’m going to make it a new entry so more folks can respond – stay tuned.
I’m sure it will be a problem to some extent.
Of course if you have an FAQ on your site about formats, like “Why don’t you sell your books in X format that I still use on my 10 year old device” you could point folks to Calibre (heck Adobe even tells publishers using InDesign to use it to make a Kindle/Mobi file from an epub).
It’s free and there are tutorials out there. Not that they’re really needed, if someone can use a computer they should be able to do a conversion in Calibre. It’s literally point and click. Plus has the added benefit of being a way for folks to organize their books and transfer them to various devices. I don’t know what it’s conversions to PDF look like (or why someone would want to), but conversions from epub to Mobi, eReader, LIT, etc. are great.
Not that it’s going to solve all the problems of not offering the other formats, but it might help.
Got ya. I guess I’d sell both ePub and Mobi on your site if I were you, but even though it’s easy to do the Mobi once you have the ePub I can see some reasons why you might not want to.
If it were easy, and company prestige were not involved (MY format! Mine is the one that should be chosen as the standard!) it would already have happened. However, it is not a unique problem. The wheel need not be reinvented. Solutions have been found in other branches of the communications and electronics industries to problems that seemed just as thorny, convoluted to the participants.
At least I can be happy that when I buy a DVD, I never needed to have a MGM movie player stacked over my Disney movie player, stacked over my Paramount movie player, and not be able to watch 20th Century Fox movies at all without having to engage in technically-criminal actions because I just can’t afford a fourth player and I need to convert those pixels to see them. (although I do have one High-Def DVD hanging around somewhere…)
So, I don’t know how this works in the US, but in the UK, rules about non-returnability do not apply if the product is shown to be defective. You are ALWAYS entitled to a refund if the product you bought does not adequately fulfil its purpose or has been sold with misleading advertising, etc. You go first to the place where you bought it and if they refuse you go to Trading Standards who will investigate (both the seller and the manufacturer, i.e. the publisher) and have the right to award you compensation and even close businesses down.
It seems to me absolutely clear that an ebook so badly converted as the one in the original post is not fit for sale. Amazon are doing the right thing in refunding the money, but if I were them I’d also be refusing to sell ebooks from that publisher until they’ve got their act together. As a customer, I’d be demanding my money back from wherever I bought the book and I’d also be making a huge public fuss in the reviews I left on the website. But I don’t think I would be contacting the publishers about it. Isn’t that the whole point of the agency system, that publishers don’t deal with readers? Well, fine, let them deal with the retailers who stop stocking their crappy products because of all the hassle they’re getting from customers demanding money back.
Answering some of Marguerite’s questions (disclaimer: I do not speak for my employer, the parent university, the state, etc.):
What format are the books in when they are sent to the printer?
These days, probably press-quality PDF, though I’d have to check with a production person to make sure. (Note that the PDF may not be coming directly from the publisher; it may be sent via the outside firm who typeset the book. Depends on the publisher’s production workflow; some typeset in-house, and others outsource.)
Why is it so difficult to get a properly-checked e-book when such errors would rarely happen in print?
Why are conversion methods still so error-prone – are they working from a digital file, or scanning a print copy?
For backlist, they’re almost certainly scanning print copies, because there aren’t digital files available. (Or if they are available, they’re PDFs, which often aren’t any better than print copies; you still have to run OCR on them. Or they’re electronic files in some format or program that your current computer can’t read, and it’s cheaper to have someone scan the book than to have someone convert and clean up the files. See also your last question.)
If you’re OCRing, you’re not going to get the quality of the original print book unless you proofread thoroughly. Which means extra expense—for a short novel, maybe $300-400; for a larger or complicated book, easily twice that.
That’s not too bad for one book in one format. But if you have 1000 backlist titles (and for a big publisher, it might be 5000 or 10K titles) to convert, and you’re trying to proofread multiple formats for each book…. Well, that’s a large up-front outlay of cash, which the publisher may well not have.
For a brand-new title, in theory there’s a file containing the final edited book, with actual words, images, and text formatting/tagging. In practice, that file may or may not be easy to convert into an ebook. (I’ve tried InDesign’s epub export on a relatively simple book, and the results I got were crap. That might be due to my inexperience rather than ID’s capabilities, though; I’m not in production/design.)
In fewer but still notable cases, why does it seem that the earlier drafts of books are going out in the e-format, rather than the final draft?
Perhaps the publisher had Word files of the original manuscript or the first edit, but those files didn’t have any corrections that were added in later on proofs; they used those files instead of having files made from the final book. That’d be my guess, anyway.
but doesn’t the Nook use it’s own format? it seems like everybody who comes out with a new reader also comes out with their own proprietary format.
I’m with Gwynnyd – until the Format Wars and Price Wars and bad proofreading stuff gets settled, I’m not putting out my bucks for an expensive reader and more expensive ebooks when I can get it all settled in my print books.
While the Nook can use eReader as a legacy format it also uses ePub just like Sony and others.
Note: ePub books from B&N do use a different DRM scheme, BUT the Nook can also use the more ‘standard’ ePub DRM scheme that everyone else (except Apple iBooks) uses. The DRM scheme B&N uses should also eventually be usable on Sony and other readers, but it isn’t at this point.
Brian said on…
04.22.10 at 11:19 AM
Of course if you have an FAQ on your site about formats, like “Why don’t you sell your books in X format that I still use on my 10 year old device” you could point folks to Calibre (heck Adobe even tells publishers using InDesign to use it to make a Kindle/Mobi file from an epub).
Every single time I buy an ebook and need to strip the DRM off of it and/or convert it into another format it pisses me off and I wonder why I even bother.
One of the biggest selling points for ebooks is convenience (for online shopping in general for that matter) so why negate that benefit by not offering as many formats as you reasonably can? Every time you don’t offer a customer what they’re looking for you’re sending them to a search engine that’s going to offer them exactly what they’re looking for—a book in their prefered format, without DRM, without geo-restrictions and, oh yeah, it’s free. I wish people would actually give me what I want in exchange for my money instead of taking my money and telling me what I need to do to get what I want. It’s crazy.
And now we know why it’s not that easy for publishers to just do what readers want. Because on one hand they have readers like Gwynned who say “give me one format I can use” and on the other readers like Tabetha who say “give me the format I want”. Hopefully those two statements will merge into one cohesive comment someday, where the one format is the one everyone wants (like mp3), but we haven’t quite hit that tipping point yet. So in the meantime, publishers have to try to keep both readers happy!
@Angela James
Amen. I can’t wait for the day when proprietary platforms like the Kindle and nook are obsolete. It really shouldn’t be this hard. lol
The nook really isn’t that proprietary. You can use DRM pdb files on it pretty easily. The only device that is truly proprietary as far as DRM files is the Kindle, since it doesn’t handle epub, or DRM mobi.
If we could just convince all publishers/authors/agents that the Baen/Webscription model (or some version of it) is the way to go there would be many more happy ebookers out there. 🙂 Give us DRM free books at a good price (and buy global ebook rights). Of course Baen buys non-exclusive e-rights and I suppose many pubs wouldn’t do that.
It does certainly get frustrating sometimes when you’re “standing there” with money in hand and they don’t seem to want to take it.
I must say that the only time that I had a problem with Sony’s Connect bookstore was when I downloaded a book that hadn’t been completely posted. It was missing the last 100 pages of the book in question.
Of course I didn’t notice that until almost a month later when I got around to reading the book. When I went back to download it again, thinking it was a problem on my computer’s end, the same thing happened.
When I contacted them by email (a lot easier then, not so easy now), they responded first with an apology and a request to wait until they could look into the situation. Less than a week later I received a new email telling me to rebuy. Perfect and complete.
Oh, lord, yes. At least she can get on her web people to fix it ASAP. (Yet another reason why I’m glad I maintain my own site…)
Well, technically, I want one format everyone can use. If everyone had to use one standard format, the one they “wanted” would be the one being sold. Standardization: sometimes a good thing? Yes?
And this is exactly why I have not bought an e-reader yet (or bothered to figure out how to do it on my iPhone). When they figure it out, is time enough for me to do it. I’m pleased to read that it is down to only a three-way duke it out.
It’s 2010. An MP3 is an MP3 regardless of what device you use to listen to it. A DVD is a DVD (or a Blu-Ray is a Blu-Ray) no matter who manufactured the player. Email can be sent from any isp to any isp. Browsers on any computer open the same web sites. Text and twitter goes to any phone no matter what carrier. But e-books are stuck in proprietary formats like it’s 1988, which makes them more expensive and harder to edit and produce than they need to be. [headdeskthud]
I hope that ePub will soon become the norm. I have some books in Pdf, but the formating goes funky when I put it on my Sony and pick a larger size print.
At first the ePub that I read (the latest J. D. Robb) threw me. When I increased it to large print on my PRS-505, it only had 285 or so pages. WTF? I thought I was missing most of the book since most hit the high hundreds or low thousands of pages. I actually went to the last line in the book, then went to a bookstore to compare. Perfect! I now love the fact that the page numbering is the same, that the book looks wonderful on my screen.
one79? Oh, yeah. One format for all 79 publishers I might buy from.
Well, that’s a perfect way of putting it. Not being an ebook convert (still waiting for ebook readers to become more affordable), my experience with piracy is mostly through fansubs of anime. I have a few legal, licensed anime DVDs with subtitling that is just pitiful in comparison to the fandubs that originally convinced me to buy the DVDs legally – companies don’t seem to realize that, by putting out bad products that cost as much or more than good quality fandubs, they’re practically pushing their customers towards pirated stuff. I try to be good and buy legally, but whenever I see a series released by certain companies, I can’t help but wonder if I’ll regret being good.
If I had bought an ebook like that, I’d at the very least contact the store I bought it from. It’s the same thing I’d do if I bought a book that had garbled type or missing pages. Any product that a company sells needs to meet certain basic standards. In the case of a book, whether it is available in print or electronically, it needs to have readable text. Of course, that’s not much comfort if you really want something in ebook form (and not print) and it’s only available in this one nearly unreadable version.
fandub=fansub
Proofreading, must do it more.
them56 – I’ll try to catch them 56 errors next time. Wait, what? Oh, yes, those 56. lol
Many thanks to everyone who answered my questions, particularly @Castiron and @SBSarah for being so thorough.
I suppose I assumed older titles would be scanned in, with the associated errors, and was mostly thinking about newer ones. I bought an e-book earlier this year that was a new title, not even out in paperback yet, and it was awful. There were some few ordinary typos, but then it was though the find-and-replace monster had eaten the proper text. Every instance of “your”, “you’re”, and “You’re” was replaced with “Your”. A boat was “Móred” in place (one of the characters is named Mór). Paragraph breaks were lost, meaning the dialogue seemed to be coming from the wrong character.
I didn’t realise that books go to the printer in a PDF or equivalent, and thought it would be more like LaTeX, or Word, or even an XML document. Converting those to e-book would not be error-free, but would be much easier (I think) than the system currently in place. So, when I thought that was the original digital file format (where such files exist), it seemed extra-strange that e-book and print book results/quality were so different. Now I know better! (The More You Know….!)
I’m not a fan of e-books being priced higher than paperbacks, but I can see the reasoning behind it. However, when it’s a defective product like the experience I had, or Marilyn’s even worse example, it becomes a joke. If you want to charge me as a reader of e-books more because it’s more expensive to make this extra conversion, okay, but make sure it’s at least the equivalent of your print release. I want to give you my money, publishers/resellers, so please don’t make it so difficult and disappointing!
In all the discussions of the sources of eBooks, nobody mentioned just snatching up a pirated copy – but I assure you it’s been done. I have looked over some pirated material (yes, shame on me), and when a publisher made the book legitimately available, I snatched that up. I don’t at all mind paying for the real thing. Imagine my surprise to find the very same errors in the for-pay book that were in a pirated – scanned and edited – version from years earlier.
I’ll even mention an example. John DeChancie wrote the Starriggers Trilogy way back when. It’s been out of print for years. I found all three volumes in a torrent of Science Fiction Books. I’ve erased nearly all of the books from that download. I try to be law-abiding. But I bought Volume 1 from Baen Books Webscriptions. It had the same errors as the other copy. I later found Volumes 1 and 2 at Fictionwise. Same errors again. Remember, the torrent predated both legit sources, and was evidently the source for the subsequent editions. Nobody has offered Volume 3 yet.
It isn’t that the pirate copy is better. It’s that the pirate copy exists and a legitimate copy doesn’t. And then the publishers pirate the pirates… you have to enjoy the irony.
@Gary I’ve suggested to more than a few authors that they look for digital copies of their previously print books on pirating sites, in order to sell the digital rights to publishers but not have to re-type or scan the book in. I think it makes sense to gain some benefit from the pirated version! But I would expect they’d proofread it!
The squeaky wheel gets the grease ^-^
Now I’m picturing Illya Kuryakin enforcing ebook formats around the world. *g*
There’s been many an ebook I’ve downloaded that’s had strange typos such as Marilyn gives example of. If there’s not too many, I can keep on going with the book. But I’ve had a couple of doozies that just completely break down into gobble-de-gook and I’ve not had the patience to finish.
But the worst ebook disaster I’ve had didn’t have to do with nonsense spelling but mixed up chapters. I was reading Irving Wallace’s The Man, which is a pretty long book. Things were going along fine up to the middle of the story. Suddenly I found myself reading about the outcome of a trial and thinking to myself “What trial? When did this happen? Who is this character? Where’d he/she come in?” I then realized that the last chapters of the book had been inserted into the middle, making me find out the dramatic conclusion to the entire novel before I had even gotten to why there was a trial in the first place.
I couldn’t agree more. New books are easy. They capture the ebook from the publishing file used to print the book, that being the last place editing occurs and errors are removed or introduced.
For older books, those files probably no longer exist. If the gods smile, the author may have kept (and backed up – what are the odds) the last edited version of the manuscript in Word, or Word Perfect, or Wordstar, or Peachtext, or…
Anything more than twenty years old, the pirate copy is probably the best available, and even those need work. Let me rephrase a bit; even the very best of those need proofreading and editing.
The most disconcerting error I have had en ebook conversion was one book that came without quotation marks. None. Is was a bit surreal—made me think of e. e. cummings. I debated requesting a refund, but it was a favorite author, and so I finished it.
In recent years, Fictionwise has gotten most of my ebook business. I have had great support from them. Twice, a book would be fine to read on my PC, but wouldn’t transfer to my Palm legibly; they gave me a refund. Ditto for those with problem conversions. So I am a happy customer.
It’s sad to think that I’ve become accustomed to reading mistakes like
for
. My English teacher mother and brother read paper books, not ebooks, and perhaps I should not suggest they change. It’d drive them crazy!
They are responsible for roughly a third of my eLibrary and the majority of my eRomances. I’ve only had to go to support twice, when computer problems wiped out my MSReader registration. They fixed me right up, but it taught me never to permit DRM on my computer.
Were your palm problems from downloading the wrong version of PDB files? Apparently there’s eReader and classic Palm and both use PDB extension.