Ebook sales have skyrocketed, but poorly converted books are still a major problem.
Barnes & Noble may have solved the problem of reading E Ink in the dark with its GlowLight, but digital books still have a long way to go for other reasons.
Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Sony, among others, have powered up their ebook stores lately. You can browse and buy hundreds of thousands of current titles, as well as download millions of free public domain books from 1923 and earlier, at these and other independent sites. The latest crop of ebook readers feature vast improvements in weight and page refresh speed, and most now include touch screens.
But in the race to make everything digital, it appears a lot of corners were cut. And now that all this time has passed, not enough publishers are going back and fixing the mistakes. In some cases, they're just leaving it up to us readers to complain.
Typos and Other Mistakes Abound
Plenty of important books remain unavailable in a digital format. Right now, you still can't buy or borrow a digital copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Catcher in the Rye . Other popular classics like All Quiet on the Western Front, 100 Years of Solitude, and The Bell Jar are still missing. The Harry Potter series and numerous key Philip K. Dick books just arrived, so at least those are off the list. There may be various reasons why digital editions of popular books don't exist yet—rights issues and royalty disputes with authors and estates are two of the big ones. Hopefully, we'll see this problem recede over time, the way it did with certain music artists and Apple's iTunes Store.
That's all nothing compared to the typo situation, though. Five years after the Amazon Kindle first hit the market, I'm still seeing all kinds of problems with digital books. Fast Food Nation contains the occasional misspelled word, or pair of words run together—and by occasional, I mean every 15 or 20 pages, which is still unacceptable. Some are much worse; Steve Hagen's Buddhism Plain and Simple has a typo every two or three pages. A quick check of various Internet forums, as well as some of my friends and colleagues heavily invested in ebooks, shows I'm far from alone.
What's particularly galling is that nearly all of the typos would show up in a simple spell check. These aren't cases where the word is spelled correctly, but used in the wrong spot for the wrong thing, like "their" instead of "there." They're actual, mistyped words that a spell checker would flag immediately.
Running a spell check on an 80,000-word book wouldn't be automatic. Someone would have to go through and make sure all the proper names are correct, all the terminology is still correct, and so on—things that a spell checker would stumble over, but wouldn't necessarily be wrong. That could take a few hours. But we're talking about a one-time job after each OCR scan, for a book that could sell thousands of digital copies, and for which people have already paid good money.
There are plenty of other issues. Many Kindle books don't come with covers, including paid titles like Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West. I've noticed a tendency for book covers to go missing even among books I've already owned for a while, both free and paid, in Amazon's Cloud Reader as well as across my various devices. I tried working with Amazon's tech support, but only received boilerplate on how to reinstall books on specific devices, not anything about what to do with errors showing up in the cloud. There are also well-documented problems with low-resolution image scans, data tables with missing or incomplete columns, and poetry books with incorrect line justification, and other formatting errors.
Taking Matters Into Your Own Hands
There's conflicting information out there as to whether the publisher or ebook store is responsible for the conversion process. It seems to differ on a case-by-case basis. Moreover, there's no clear standard on what to do once typos are corrected. My vote would be a manual update, requested only by the owner, but with an email notification from the store saying whenever updated version is available. This way you avoid the situation Amazon found itself in a few years ago, when it suddenly yanked books like 1984 off of owners' devices before reversing course, in a fantastic bit of irony.
Amazon has a mechanism for reporting Kindle book errors yourself: Scroll all the way down on any Kindle book product page, and you'll find a Feedback dialog box. One of the questions is, "Would you like to report poor quality or formatting in this book?" Whether that should be up to us, as paying customers, is debatable, but the option is there. (I couldn't find a comparable option on Nook product pages, or in B&N's Nook Book help section.)
There are other options. Calibre is an awesome, multi-platform, free tool that lets you manage your ebook collection, convert formats in multiple directions, change covers, and otherwise make modifications you otherwise normally aren't able to, at least in some cases. Myriad other conversion tools exist on the Web; many work with all of the open formats, if not the protected ones.
I'm one of the people who thought I'd never convert to digital books. I used to give all the usual, sometimes vaporous reasons: The smell and feel of real paper, shopping in used book stores, being able to lend books to friends, and so on. Now I'm an ebook convert. But if we're going to pay nearly the same price—and sometimes more—for digital books as we did for the print versions, shouldn't we at least expect the same level of quality?
For more, see Six Things Ereaders Could Still Use.
For more from Jamie, follow him on Twitter: @jlendino.
