There have been a lot of discussions on blogs and Amazon forums about the inconsistent, and all too often poor, quality of the Kindle books sold on Amazon’s Kindle Store. The complaints tend to focus on typos (that are not in the print edition), extraneous hyphens, and a plethora of formatting problems.
For example, there’s a post on the Simplicitas blog and a discussion thread on a MobileRead forum.
And here are some of the many discussion threads on the topic on Amazon’s own Kindle Forum:
Tired of Kindle books with non-linked ToCs
Complaint about overly dark covers and images on Kindle
Finding too many spelling errors & typos
Complaint about lack of followable links to footnotes
More complaints about excessive errors, possibly due to poor OCR or other conversions
Concerns about the highly variable quality of Kindle editions
More complaints about too many typos, again likely due to conversion problems
I’ve read through every one of these complaints and see none that can’t be solved, or at least mitigated, by more careful design on the part of whomever is doing the conversion.
Our subsidiary, Five Rainbows Services, has been doing Kindle conversion for 19 months. We have successfully converted a wide variety of books (fiction and nonfiction, highly formatted and not).
Most of the problems addressed in the discussions above stem from the use of automated conversion software (which typically alleges to create Kindle-compatible formats from Microsoft Word, Adobe PDF, etc. files). They will, in fact, create files that can be viewed on a Kindle, but the results are rarely satisfactory, nor do they come close to replicating the reading experience of the book’s print edition. Often, extraneous codes are generated by the software and, sometimes (particularly when trying to extract usable formatted text or HTML from a PDF file), extra hyphens and line breaks occur.
The best course, if you want a nicely formatted Kindle book that provides a pleasant reading experience, is to create an HTML file and then carefully manipulate that code to get the display you want. You have to learn what HTML tags are displayed properly on the Kindle, which are not displayed at all (or are displayed differently than on a web page), and how to use the tags that are unique to the Kindle/Mobipocket format (Amazon owns Mobipocket, in case you did not know, and uses the same basic format).
Sometimes, you have to play around a bit to find a way to display a book that contains complicated formatting, while still maintaining a solid, comfortable reading experience. You also need to test the design at the smallest and largest possible display fonts on an actual Kindle.
As with most things in life, shortcuts in Kindle formatting might produce acceptable results…but might not. And your reader may very well notice the difference.
Just for reference, here are a few Kindle screen shots from books we have converted recently (click on a thumbnail for a larger image).
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- ToC (left) and Haning Indent (right)
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- Chapter Quote (left) and Bibliography (right)
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- Section Page (left) and Boxed Text (right)
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- Linked End Notes (left) and Notes Page (right)
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- Fancy Chapter Opening (left) and Subheadings (right)
So, if you want great results for your Kindle edition, either learn how to do it right or hire somebody who does.
It really will matter to your reader!
8 Comments
July 6, 2009 at 2:18 pm
Hey, that first book sample looks good. I should order it! LOL!
The rest of the book, Free Pecan Pie and Other Chick Stories, looks just as good. Great work, Walt, and many thanks.
I actually saw a comment on an Amazon discussion last week that said people were going offshore to get their Kindle conversions. Why on earth would they do that when they have you, right here in this country?!
July 6, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Well, thank you, Janelle, for the kind words.
We’ve got a good handle on Kindle formatting. I’m just now finishing our first EPUB conversion and have just about figured that out, too! (It’s a lot more work than Kindle, though.)
July 7, 2009 at 11:48 am
I hope you’re leaving your brain to science…
July 14, 2009 at 10:49 am
[...] That’s what most content on my Kindle feels like today…cheap copies of the original. Quite a few books look like the print to e- conversion was done so haphazardly that nobody ever bothered to look at the finished product. As publishers we fret about the prospects of $9.99 price ceilings for ebooks and yet we treat that rapidly growing sector as a quick-and-dirty way to make an extra buck or two. Where’s the R&D, the investment in future platforms and products? Btw, Walt Shiel recently wrote a great blog post related to this called Kindle Errors and Typos. [...]
July 14, 2009 at 11:34 am
I recently sent errata back to an author with a comment that he should get someone else to proof his work before submitting and he said that gets done in the print copy, but not in the e-copy. I guess that is about what I should expect in a $5 book. Maybe they should be clearly labeled “Beta”.
July 14, 2009 at 11:39 am
Al,
There is no reason to use anything but the final edited copy of the p-book as a source file for the e-book. And the price of the book, in any format, should have no bearing on the quality of the presentation.
However, depending on how the file was converted, other errors (including some that look like typos) can creep into the e-book conversion. That’s where knowing what you’re doing makes a difference — you know what to look for and how to fix it.
July 14, 2009 at 11:48 am
There is at least one reason to use the pre-print copy of the book, and that is a long delay between submitting a book to a publisher and the actual release, measured in months. In my example above, the author admitted that it was not properly proofed because his editor was going to proof it. I think that he should not have submitted a book for sale until it is ready, but he obviously thinks otherwise. This was the second book of his that I had read, the first one had even more errors.
July 14, 2009 at 4:53 pm
That may be an excuse…but it is in no way a good reason. All a publisher has to do is plan the workflow properly, and the same edited manuscript can be used for all editions, print and electronic.
It’s not difficult. Remember the Six Ps: