Re: (review) The Flowers of Vashnoi by Lois McMaster Bujold

On Fri, 04 Apr 2025 16:15:12 -0400, WolfFan <akwolffan@zoho.com>
wrote:

<snippo hater-of-ebooks>

I have stopped buying dead tree books except where I have no choice, and the
number of books I want which are not available as ebooks is dwindling.
Further, because a lot of my library is ‘out of print’ I have been
scanning, OCRing, and ripping to EPUB a lot of my existing dead tree books. I
have also been deDRMing as many ebooks as possible. Note that some ebooks are
of very low quality; Amazon in particular screws up many history and
technical books, messing with illustrations, maps, diagrams and more. On
several occasions I have had to buy a dead tree edition specifically to get
the correct layout and then to scan and OCR it, with illustrations etc. in
the correct places, because Amazon was too damn lazy to do it right. For
example the Kindle version of James McPherson’s excellent The Battle Cry of
Freedom messes up the illustrations, despite being very not cheap. The
cheaper Kindle editions of several books are repleat with OCR errors. One of
the things I do when deDRMing a book is to run through it and correct the OCR
errors. There are several reasons why I don’t buy many Amazon books any
more.

I haven't but nonfiction for a long time, although I am still working
through the ones I have. So I really can't comment on nonfiction
eBooks.

The graphic novel /From Hell/, even had I liked it, was enough to
convince me that Kindle, at least, is hopelessly incapable of handling
such items -- manga, graphic novels, comics collections, art books,
other categories may exist. I don't think this is a Kindle problem as
such but rather an inherent limitation.

Kindle illustrations tend to be a pain. Ignoring the OCR mishaps
("unknown object found" or something similar) for a moment, most can
be expanded to full-screen (or at least could on the older Kindles
with mechanical interfaces). Unfortunately, this produces a much
vaguer image.

I have, in the past, tried reading a PDF version of a newsletter on
Kindle. This does not work if the original has more than one column.
And, anyway, I prefer print magazines.

I suspect modern books, those that were put into final form on a
computer and printed from the file, are simply converted to (in
effect, printed to) Kindle. This generally produces higher prices and
fewer glitches. The glitches, of course, reflect a lack of
proofreading.

Older books are mostly scanned and not proofread. This is why they
don't cost a lot. I have seen books (possibly part of an omnibus, I
don't recall) where, at the bottom of a page, the Chapter Title was
badly butchered -- yet it was identical to the first line of the
chapter, which appeared immediately below the title, and that line
itself had no OCR problems. Some books are so regular in their OCR
errors that a diligent reader can eventually figure them out and just
read the book. Although I do sometimes wonder if, 3000 years from now,
faced with only the Kindle Dickens omnibus I bought, scholars will
debate endlessly if "k" was /really/ written "l:" in the age of
Dickens.

Some older books are simply scanned in page-by-page. These are
characterized by very large files, no links, and no font/type
size/line spacing controls. I avoid them whenever possible.

I'm not sure how much responsibility Amazon bears for this. Clearly,
they are responsible for the limitations of the Kindle format and the
various programs displaying Kindle documents they produce. But is it
really Amazon that (except for books clearly so marked) does the OCR
and fails to do the proofreading? It seems to me that the publisher
(generally not Amazon) is responsible for that.
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"