[khrunner]

I'm new, so I hope this hasn't already been addressed.  I'm reading my third book on my Kindle 2.  The first two (by the same author and, I presume, same publisher) were reasonably clear.  In the current book, one of the characters speaks in Arial bold and the rest of the story is in another font - Times Roman, maybe?  Anyway, the Arial is fine, but the TR is missing parts of the letters.  Is this something to be expected?  Some books will format better than others?  Anybody else seen this?  I'd add my vote to those who would like to see more contrast.  However, I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship.

 

[Mike D. aka jmiked]

The book that is missing parts of the letters is probably in the infamous Topaz format, which has a tendency to look pretty bad if the publisher doesn't take care. It's not a function of the book, per se, but of how the publisher does the conversion to Kindle format.

Mike

 

[Ann in Arlington]

Mike is right:  it's likely a case of the alternate formatting technique.  If it is annoying enough, let Amazon know.  They want to fix books where the formatting is noticeably bad.  I think on the Amazon page for the book, way at the bottom, there's a place to provide feedback that will link to that particular title.

Ann

 

[khrunner]

Thanks for the good advice! 

KH

 

[Kind]

I think I've read posts on this board complaining about the "Topaz" format. That must be it.

 

[marianneg]

Bad "formatting" is sometimes just bad OCR software combined with no proofreading.

 

[davem2bits]

Bad "formatting" is sometimes just bad OCR software combined with no proofreading.

OCR? Why does a publisher have to scan a book? Don't they have an electronic version? What did they give the printer to have the book made?

 

[Mike D. aka jmiked]

OCR? Why does a publisher have to scan a book? Don't they have an electronic version? What did they give the printer to have the book made?

Ah, the young!

Most books don't exist in electronic versions. That's pretty much a 1990s and later phenomenon. Previously, books were printed from offset plates made from photographic negatives made from hard copy. I did a lot of paste-ups from typeset manuscripts in my younger days.

Mike

 

[Leslie]

OCR? Why does a publisher have to scan a book? Don't they have an electronic version? What did they give the printer to have the book made?

Even if the author did deliver a book in an electronic version, the final edited version, which gets printed, may not be in a format that is easily convertible to an ebook, if they weren't planning to do an ebook.

L

 

[davem2bits]

I see said the blind man. 

 

[sirsell]

Funny, I was just thinking about this the other day and going to post this...thanks for the info!