Friday, April 27, 2012

Getting a Bad Reputation

I've been reading a Stephen King book I never heard of, Eyes of the Dragon.  It's good.  I'm enjoying it.  But I'm reading the Kindle version and the quality of the book is poor.  There are typos all over the problem.  I checked Amazon and other readers reported the same thing.  What gives?

I expect this sort of shoddy quality from self-publishing work, not from well-known writers.  What surprises me is this is not the first e-book like this I've seen.  So why am I reading the electronic version if the quality is so poor.  This is going to give this format a bad reputation and make me go back to paper.

I don't really want to but I don't want to read a story that I can't follow because or typos and grammatical error either.  Publishers really are going to have to watch this.

Of course, it is possible I'm reading a pirated copy of some of these books.  Not in the Amazon case, but some of the free books I've gotten.

Ironically, books from Project Gutenberg seem to be of better quality and I can access the source to create a Kindle version or PDF version if I want to.  Given this and the lack of flexibility built into commercial e-books (the one I pay for), why am I paying for them?  The quality of the Gutenberg book is better and they are free.  Of course, the selection is restricted but there are so many classics I've not read I can spend some time with Dickens and Poe and Dumas and several other 19th century writers for a while.

But I'll finish this Stephen King book I started first I think.

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