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Not of merchantable quality [updated]
This is pretty unacceptable. I mentioned that some of the Kindle books I've been buying to read on my iPad have had decidedly funky - and completely amateurish - formatting, despite being the output of blue chip publishers. Well, the other day I bought a technical book, complete with complicated text layouts, and the damn thing is almost unusable. Take a look at the two images lower down in this post. They're from two different versions of this book and they're samples of how to write Ruby software - that's what the book is about. In the properly formatted example (the first one) there are some comments over on the left and the code itself on the right. But look at the second version, the Kindle one. It jumbles the comments in with the example of how to write software. This book is supposed to be giving you your first glance at Ruby code and it's turned it almost into junk. You certainly couldn't get that code to run. And yet in the print version, it's all neatly arranged. So where did it all go wrong?
Seriously, I'm interested to know. Is this widespread, with the Kindle versions of textbooks being sold in the Amazon store while being unusable? Or can the Kindle format handle these sorts of layouts properly and it's just this particular publisher (and a few others I've been unlucky enough to encounter) that's screwed up?
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"An iPod moment"
Interesting article in the Guardian about the gathering pace of e-book popularity. It almost looks like a major shift in buying patterns. But you're not fooled. This is just a flash in the pan. The medium is partly the message and novels are terribly diminished if they're being read with the latest technology. And what about the smell of books? Never forget that the old-fashioned, musty, elitist whiff of books is part of their appeal. And what if you dropped one in the bath or sat on it? (Not that you'll buy the technology even when it is indestructible and waterproof.) And these sales are probably all celebrity tattle-tales, self-help and ghost-written auto-biogs. Frankly if this is the future they can keep it. What's so great about being able to touch a word to see its meaning and etymology? Or carrying five hundred books in your pocket with another million available to buy in seconds? Books aren't meant to be self-illuminating in the dark or to turn their own pages. Why can't we all just accept that it's still the 1950s in certain parts of the book industry and stop all this change for change's sake? Mutter mutter make our own fun in those days mutter mutter national service never did anyone any harm mutter mutter country's gone to the dogs mutter. What do you mean you can tune into last week's Archers and Gardeners' Question Time on one of those things? That's not possible, is it? Give it here.