First of all, I have a love relationship with my Kindle Fire and my ebooks. Sometimes, I am a mood reader which is why I keep a couple of books going at a time. With my Kindle, I can take it with me and have many books available if I am in a mood for something particular. I enjoy the portability of having lots of my books available to me while only carrying a few ounces of weight. However, I also have a hate relationship with some ebooks I have gotten over the years.
I started reading ebooks before ereaders were common place among us. At that time, I downloaded the books from ebooks sites generally in PDF formats. I still have them, have converted them using Calibre and moved them to my Kindle. When I got my first Kindle (keyboard generation and still my favorite although it died), I got a lot of inexpensive ebooks from new authors or authors who had not been traditionally published and had opted for self-publishing. Before continuing, I want to say that I have found some authors this way that I love and am very happy with. However, I have also noted many problems with these types of ebooks. My pet peeves: bad grammatical errors, spelling errors, etc. Kid you not, I purchased an ebook from an indie author that had a sentence in it wherein the lead character went to one of the tropical island paradises and the author mentioned the name of the capital city. Immediately after the capital city’s name was a set of parenthesis with a question mark in them, so we had the name and then (?) behind it. My only thought was that I did not have a problem with the author in their draft not being sure of the name of the capital and leaving herself a note to check it out, but then it was published with the question mark still there! Really? I don’t remember now if I checked to see if the name of the capital city was accurate, but at that point, I did not care. More than once, I have screamed, “Where is the editing in this book?” I certainly do not mind the occasional error—it happens. Nobody is perfect. But repetitive errors in the same book are not acceptable to me when I pay hard-earned money for a book.
I need to stop ranting now. Seriously, I love ebooks, but I feel that the industry has a lot of work to do.
To Be Continued.
Happy Reading,
debra
Geek Sneak Peek 