[Tranquil Ape]

Love my kindle... but i had a question, i've had it for a couple weeks now and have already read 4 books... but one of them "without remorse"  has a lot of Typos in it... not even 15 percent through it and ive seen at least 25... most commonly is a '1' instead of an 'I'  obviously a character recognition problem.  or ive seen words with mixed sub/super script.  Does amazon have a way to report these so they get fixed at some point?  I'm fine reading it, for the most part it doesnt disturb my reading... just want to contribute to making the book better more perfect, and was curious.

The other thing was... does anyont know any way to find out when books will be available for kindle?  example, i want to reread Anne Rice's Vampire chronicles and catch up... last one i read was Tale of the body Thief (4th book) when it originally hit shelves... on amazon  the earliest book in the series i can find is like the 7th or 8th in the series....  why oh why arent the others Kindle-ized...

Thanks for your time, I know return you to your regularly scheduled browsing...

 

[Betsy the Quilter]

I know one of our members has been contacting customer service, which you can do by email.  Be specific, citing the location number of the error, not just "there are a lot of errors".  If there are a lot of errors, list some of them at least, and then indicate there are more.

Betsy

 

[Athenagwis]

I also wanted to know what people thought was appropriate for contacting an author about spelling mistakes in a book.  I am not sure if it’s the recognition software or not, but one book I was reading had a whole paragraph where it was supposed to be ‘she’ and they had ‘he’ and they also had a couple other spelling errors.  I am not sure if I should tell the author though, I don’t want to have hurt feelings … LOL  (It was a self-published book I believe, not a big name author)

Rachel

 

[Anju]

I also wanted to know what people thought was appropriate for contacting an author about spelling mistakes in a book. I am not sure if it's the recognition software or not, but one book I was reading had a whole paragraph where it was supposed to be 'she' and they had 'he' and they also had a couple other spelling errors. I am not sure if I should tell the author though, I don't want to have hurt feelings … LOL (It was a self-published book I believe, not a big name author)

Rachel

I usually ask the author, if it a self-published one, if they would like to me to tell them some of the things I found inconsistent in their work. As a general rule they want to know, so go ahead and ask, but don't be disappointed or hurt if they say no.

 

[pidgeon92]

The book I am reading right now - Sleep Toward Heaven - is a formatting mess. Only at the smallest font is it readable, at larger fonts the last word of each sentence drops to the next line, and is the only word on the line. At various places, it will give the title of the book and a number, which I think may be the page number.  There are a lot of italicized words, and there is no space before or after so all the words run together. I'm half-way through and it's an excellent book or I would have returned it.

 

[DD]

I once reported a poorly formatted book to Amazon and they refunded the purchase price of the book, although that is not what I asked for when I contacted them.  The book then disappeared from my media library but remained on my Kindle until I deleted it.  I don't know what is done about correcting errors in these books, but I hope someone is paying attention to that.

 

[PJ]

Can anyone explain why a book published within the last 10 years would have to be scanned to create an eBook?  I thought the era printing books using manually set moveable type was long gone.  Wouldn't any book in print exist as text somewhere on some computer file?  And if it does why would you scan and use OCR on a printed version of that book rather than format the stored text?

 

[akpak]

does anyone know any way to find out when books will be available for kindle?

There's no good way. You could go to the author's website (if they have one), and see if they've made any comment about it.

The best thing to do for now is to get those non-Kindle books from other eBook sellers, and make good use of the "I'd like to read this on Kindle!" link that's on every non-Kindle book listing on Amazon.

Hit all those Anne Rice titles in the DTB versions, and click that link. It lets the publishers (and probably the authors too) know that there's demand for that title.

 

[Thumper]

Can anyone explain why a book published within the last 10 years would have to be scanned to create an eBook?

Because of inconsistent formatting requirements. Publisher A may send a PDF file to print, Publisher B may still be using Pagemaker without the PDF conversion, still another may be using Quark...or the book may have changed hands and the only way to get a digital copy is to scan the bound book. Or all they have is a PDF file that hoses up on conversion, and it's faster to scan than have someone sit there and edit line by line after trying to convert it to another format.

And then there's the hardware changes--media stored on floppy disks, reel tape, etc. The not-too-forward-thinking publishers may have digital copies, but in formats they can no longer access, and they're too cheap to pay for mass conversions.

 

[Tranquil Ape]

I usually ask the author, if it a self-published one, if they would like to me to tell them some of the things I found inconsistent in their work. As a general rule they want to know, so go ahead and ask, but don't be disappointed or hurt if they say no.

hahaha not sure Tom Clancy wants me proofing his material... Im fairly certain however that the problems i've seen were due to OCR software. mainly because I read the book a number of years ago and dont recall the errors, and all the errors seem consistent with each other...not so say that the word could be mispelled numerous times, but just doesn't seem as probable.

 

[Tranquil Ape]

Can anyone explain why a book published within the last 10 years would have to be scanned to create an eBook? I thought the era printing books using manually set moveable type was long gone. Wouldn't any book in print exist as text somewhere on some computer file? And if it does why would you scan and use OCR on a printed version of that book rather than format the stored text?

Completely agree with this ...

but judging by some of the formatting i've seen in ebooks ... the only way i think they are using a computer to format the text is by throwing the loose manuscript at the monitor and then scanning the pile where it lay.

 

[Betsy the Quilter]

The other thing was... does anyont know any way to find out when books will be available for kindle? example, i want to reread Anne Rice's Vampire chronicles and catch up... last one i read was Tale of the body Thief (4th book) when it originally hit shelves... on amazon the earliest book in the series i can find is like the 7th or 8th in the series.... why oh why arent the others Kindle-ized...

In our KindleBoards Book Lovers' Links, we have this:

Notify Me When a Book is Kindled: http://oscurapress.com/mysteria/cgi-bin/mysteria.cgi

Betsy

 

[RJ Keller]

I usually ask the author, if it a self-published one, if they would like to me to tell them some of the things I found inconsistent in their work. As a general rule they want to know, so go ahead and ask, but don't be disappointed or hurt if they say no.

I can't speak for all indie authors, but I think most of them are grateful for the help if it's done politely.
I was able to correct a rather embarrassing, and stupid, mistake (palate instead of palette - d'oh!!!) because a reader was kind enough to notify me about it.