Wheel of Time Kindle eBooks

[SmallMcLittleTiny]

So, to much annoyance, i've run across a lot of books that i'd like to read but won't because of all the reviews they've gotten on Amazon concerning their quality on Kindle. Typos, errors, bad formatting, missing sentences to whole paragraphs. So, i've also read that some of the later Wheel of Time books on Kindle might suffer from one of these issues. My question is, how are the WoT books on Kindle? Are they filled with typos and bad formatting, or are they error free? Thanks in advance.

[he who comes with a bong]

i just started my last re-read of the series and this time it is on the kindle. So far so good on typos and what not, it also seems to read alot faster, as i have come to find out with most of the books i have read on the kindle.

[FarShainMael]

I'm a bit surprised that these sorts of errors can get in at all. I assume the original text these days is available to the ebook manufacturers in electronic form; so (1) it should have already been put through a spill chucker, and (2) it's a straight transfer to the processing software that generates the readable files. So what's going on?

 

(Admittedly, with a fantasy series like WoT, the spell checker dictionary will have a lot of, er, 'unusual' additions; but even so, things can't be that difficult!)

[Clouded]

I reread them on eBooks and no typos stick out in my head.

[SmallMcLittleTiny]

I'm a bit surprised that these sorts of errors can get in at all. I assume the original text these days is available to the ebook manufacturers in electronic form; so (1) it should have already been put through a spill chucker, and (2) it's a straight transfer to the processing software that generates the readable files. So what's going on?

 

(Admittedly, with a fantasy series like WoT, the spell checker dictionary will have a lot of, er, 'unusual' additions; but even so, things can't be that difficult!)

 

I think so as well. the problem seems to be older books, which the publishers don't have access to the electronic form and must scan in the book manually and OCR it. They usually don't hire a proof reader for ebooks. That's the biggest problem. They're already worried enough about ebooks cutting into their beloved hardcover sales, the more reasons for a person not to buy an ebook and instead buy the hardcover makes the publisher happier... unfortunately. They'll get around to it eventually. The digital age is here, and it's inevitable that this happens, so they will eventually change their attitude or die. But again, this is usually only a problem for older books, in which an electronic form.

[FarShainMael]

So WoT should be OK.

[Tyler Aybara]

I'm reading through the series for the first time on my kindle and I've only noticed a single typo ("think" instead of "thing") and the formatting hasn't appeared to be an issue at all. To be fair I've only made it up to Lord of Chaos but, so far so good.

[yoniy0]

My copy of ToM does contain a few typos (those are the ones I've made a note of; there could've been more I was too lazy to note):

(a) "an usually large" instead of (I presume) "an unusually large" in page 233

(b) "or was she was honoring him?" in page 284

© "The wolf The wolf image returned" in page 833

 

I assume those appeared in the first edition HC as well -- they don't seem to be OCR typos.

[aidan]

I've been re-reading them on the Kindle and they're rock solid. Some of the newer volumes, like TGS or ToM might have some little niggles, but they'd be the same that you'd find in the HC or MMPB releases.

[Scot Kraft]

If you look around online, you can find Ebook versions that have been sanitized by fans. All my kindle copies have perfect formatting and spelling etc etc.

 

I have originals and edits. The edits are far superior IMHO, spelling errors just bug me for some reason. my paper copies actually have hand written edits in them...lol

[kght22]

i love my hardbacks, but i bet every one of them has a typo or two somewhere (although harriet seems to be an awesome editor, because even on first editions typos and general errors are rare in twot books, and on other books that i read they seem to be pretty rampant on first editions).

[thom_merrilin]

I have them all on Kindle. but, I did have to get three of them redone by the publishers. Mainly because of large gaps between paragraphs, which there shoudln't be in Kindle formatted books. Other than that there isn't too much to grumble about.

[Kaznen]

I was looking into who books get formatted for Kindle. It turns out .mobi and .amz, which is the format for Kindle books, use basic HTML and CSS. That explained the weird and bad formatting I've seen in some Kindle books.

 

I'm guessing the editors of most publishing houses, while being able to rock layout on Word of Page Maker, have little to no clue about HTML because they are publishers and not programmers (even though HTML and CSS are not programming languages).

 

If you have even auto converted Word documents to HTML or used a WYSIWYG to make a web page, then looked at the code used, you would see the program used the HTML version of duct tape to get the document even half way presentable. So when it is converted again to .mobi or .amz the half @$$ed effort is even more muddled because those two formats don't recognize some of the tags and elements used.