Friday, 31 August 2012
Some thoughts on …….
Typos and other formatting problems on kindles.
I’ve just finished reading a book that highlighted some of these problems for me. I’m not a very good reviewer – I mean to write the reviews sometime, but rarely get around to it. In the case of this book I felt the need to make a comment to explain why I hadn’t enjoyed reading it as much as I thought I should.
The size of the type through the book varied – it was possibly meant to be that way, but reading on an e-reader it makes it very odd looking to find that you read a paragraph or so in huge letters like this, then back to normal, with occasional passages written in quite a small font..
The other problem that I have come across is the number of typos. Sometimes it is a word that has been used incorrectly - “their” “there” and “they’re” for example. Other times it is that the author hasn’t used a spellchecker or asked someone to read through for them.
Some readers will avoid indie authors because they think that indie = bad. Since I discovered the UK Amazon Kindle Forum on Goodreads -( http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/51445-uk-amazon-kindle-forum ) I have been introduced to a large number of excellent indie authors, and I can say that on the whole the typos in the books that I have read have been few and far between.
Back to my reading – I’m just going through some books that have been on my kindle for a while and then I have some new books to try out. I will blog about them, and you never know – I might even get around to reviewing them ;)
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Good blog Janet! I find fewer formatting problems than I used to but there's no substitute for an eagle eye in term of errors. Spell checkers can give you a false sense of security. For example, someone mentioned course grass (NOT a gold course) when he meant coarse. It's now easy for a reader to inform an author and an ounce of help is worth a pound of criticism!
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading this, Janet.
ReplyDeleteSpell checkers can be dodgy. A friend's daughter-in-law developed a website for them. Among other things they sell tannalised wood. The spell checker changed it to tantalised. She didn't notice and the website went live advertising tantalised wood!
:0)
ReplyDeleteI agree that spellcheckers aren't foolproof, because they won't highlight when a correctly spelled but wrong word is used. They will pick up some things though. A second set of eyes is always a good idea - we always had someone else check the typed documents at work before they were signed as you don't always spot your own mistakes.
Really enjoyed reading your blog and looking at the photos Janet.
ReplyDeleteI read my local newspaper yesterday and the journalist commented on what a poor harvest of "plumbs" we had here in Fife!
I try to write reviews for books that I have enjoyed butIf the book has lots of others I tend to struggle for something new to say so don't bother.