Presenting the E-book Abomination Index
by Pablo Defendini
India Amos is tired of shitty-looking ebooks. The lack of attention to detail, or rather, the lack of any quality control at all lets errors like this make it onto readers’ ebook devices:
a McGraw-Hill Professional book in which the first letter of every paragraph appears on a line by itself. Thus:
T
he quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.Hella annoying. And there was an egregious typo in the book, repeated three times in one paragraph.
So she’s set up a web form for people to log their ebook tales of woe: the E-book Abomination Index submission form.
Due to the mass-production, assembly line, and outsourced nature of ebook production at the big publishing houses, and due to the fact that, until the Kindle-fueled exponential growth in ebook sales last year, eBooks were seen as a very, very, very small source of revenue (practically negligible), there’s been little to no effort to internally police the quality of electronic books coming out of the big six publishers.
With the increasing popularity of the Kindle, and the imminent arrival of Apple’s iPad, ebooks are about to gain some serious k-points in readers’ mindshare—not to mention marketshare vis a vis their print coutnerparts. Not monitoring quality, and letting errors like these reach the end user gives validity to the accusations that some in the very zealous, very vocal, but very under-informed and up to now very small eBook enthusiast community have been making for years about the big publishers: that they don’t give two shits about readers in general and eBook readers in particular, and—in some extreme cases—that the big six are somehow out to actively sabotage the burgeoning ebook market, and that they should respond in kind.
Both charges are patently false, of course, and my serious issues with the zealots in the ebook enthusiast community could be the subject of not one, but many additional posts. However, that doesn’t mean that they’re entirely wrong—to the best of their ability they’re interpreting the message that publishers are inadvertently putting out there. Actions speak louder than words, and in this case, for every “we’re interested in eBooks” platitude that publishers put forth with their words, there’s twenty such cases where their actions (or lack thereof) communicate a different story.
Comments
This is such an amazingly frustrating point-counterpoint in my head. From being on the production side, I know what it’s like to battle retailers who won’t give you the opportunity to QA your files. I also know how difficult it is to find the help/staff/time/etc. to actually work through the QA for hundreds of books.
BUT!!! I do not tolerate excuses well. Even my own. So when I see eBooks in a craptastic layout, with unreadable fractions, with horrifying tables and charts, I get just as frustrated as any reader would.
Maybe putting us in the ‘gallows’ will help get pubs invested in QA and putting out a quality product, instead of just slapping up some text and calling it a day.
My advice to pubs: put a gratis company reader (kindle, sony, ipad, phone, whatever) AND mandatory gratis QA files/process for every book in your retail contract.
Being on the same side as you, Kate, I totally agree: it’s not easy, and the workflow isn’t set up for it. But that’s no excuse; it goes back to the point of my previous post: publishers need to take responsibility for these processes, build competencies in-house, and bring this work into its core production workflow. Relying on outside suppliers who run files through black boxen yields crap results.
Yeah, per my exchange with @arachnejericho last night (http://twitter.com/ArachneJericho/status/8995561997), this conversion was probably done blackboxenly by Fictionwise.com, where I bought the e-book. And I’m sure that McGraw-Hill doesn’t have the staff to check every single book that their vendors auto-convert for them, in every format.
But somebody‘s got to check them, and it’s the publisher’s responsibility to make sure that this gets done. As Kate says, as long as they’re outsourcing this shit, QA needs to be written into the contracts.
Somebody should host a WEBcast on this topic or something.
*cough*
Yeah, too bad nobody’s doing anything like that.
I clicked through to the Abomination submission form, but could not find a link to the page that lists all the offending ebooks that have been reported. Will you please share that link?
I recently bought an eBook – a NYT bestseller in print – that 1. listed the index in the TOC and 2. that index hyperlink pointed to the endorsements page. A WTF moment in eBooks.
We’re currently producing our eBooks in house and a lot of discussion has gone into quality control. I’m in production and, since editorial has to catch up with us, we’re making calls as to whether to include art, keep cross references or put in the time to produce hyperlinks, etc etc. Of course, since this eBook production has been shoved into our regular print schedule there is not a lot of time for this. But I felt better when I encountered the scenario I just described. We know better than that!!