You’d think a tech person would be on the bleeding edge of technology, and that I would have started reading eBooks long ago. And yet I don’t have an iPhone or an iPad. I don’t even have a tablet. When eBooks came out, I resisted the eReader push. I was convinced (and still am) that eBooks will be standardized within the next decade and become platform independent. Who needs a Nook, Kindle, or Sony eReader when everyone will be reading eBooks on their mobile phones, tablets, and laptops.
It wasn’t until after my first eBook, “animal” short story Legend of the Beemen, came out from Musa Publishing that I started reading eBooks. When I did break down, I discovered several problems with them. Some of my discoveries may surprise you.
1) eBooks are addictive.
Portable, always with you, searchable text, and easy to go to specific pages, eBooks are “more addictive than pistachios.” What makes it worse is problem #2.
2) eBooks are expensive.
I am not speaking of individual eBook prices. I’m willing to drop .99 cents or $12.99 on a book if it’s a good book. Hey, I’ve dropped $30-$50 on print books, so $4.99 is inexpensive to me. The difference is, when I’m buying print books, I pay cash or credit card, then I get a receipt in my pocket. So I know how much money I’ve just spent on my addiction. Purchasing eBooks is much easier. You just hit the “buy” button and get that instant reward-rush of a book you can download and read. Without shelling out actual money, without getting a receipt.
Click “buy.” Get reward-rush. Read book. Anyone else see the problem with this? Buying eBooks is the easiest, fastest way to hit my credit card limit because I can’t buy without having a credit card number saved with the retailer. That means I don’t have to keep entering it, which means I forget to track my spending, which means I buy way more books then I expect to. Which circles back to my “eBooks are expensive” problem.
3) Many eBooks are lousy.
Once I realized I was burning money on eBooks, I went hunting down free eBooks (Amazon and Barnes & Noble often have free eBook specials). What I found were several self-published books that were poorly written, not edited worth a darn, and made my eyes want to bleed. So, I’ve decided I won’t download any eBooks for free unless they were written by authors whose other books I’ve paid for and enjoyed.
4) Many eBooks have horrid formatting and editing.
Most of the Big 6 eBooks have problems. I hate to say it, because you would think the Big 6 publishers would have a clue in making a book readable, but eBooks seem to be an afterthought for them. They don’t pay attention to font (for making the books readable), special characters get shoved in at inappropriate places, words that read fine in the print copies get mangled (spelling-wise) in the eBook, and (unless you set the font size really really small) sometimes you can’t read the entire page on the eReader app because of the way the page is formatted.
What the big publishers don’t seem to realize, what the small epublishers have noticed, is that readers notice more when reading a digital book than they do while reading a print copy. When there are only two paragraphs of a page on a reader’s mobile, she’s a lot more likely to notice the “occasional” mistake. (I’ve actually started counting mistakes in eBooks and stop reading the book when I hit 10). Small press epublishers take the time to format manuscripts with easy-to-eRead fonts that fill the screen size without killing the margin whitespace. They seem to have stricter copy editing standards than the Big 6, and they actually take the effort to make the book appearance as pleasing as possible.
This is one of the reasons that I’m shifting my eBook attentions from the big houses to the small houses. If I’m going to drop money on eBooks, I want them to be readable. I don’t want my attention jolted out of the book by hundreds of easily fixable errors left behind by lazy editors.
Poor editing annoys me more than poor writing. And when it’s avoidable, that just makes it worse. Anyway, that’s my rant for the day. What do you think of the current standards in eBooks? And who is your favorite eBook publisher?
2 Responses
Question
Do you have any small publishing houses in mind? I am just curious.
Re: Question
Well, Musa Publishing was the first small house I noticed. That was because they actually contracted a few of my short stories. When I realized how readable they were, I got all excited and started buying other books.
Crazy 8 Press is another small house that does fantastic with the standards. Again, I noticed because I’m involved in a venture that is published by them (the Latchkeys YA series).