Looking for a site that reviews ebooks and not just books.
November 7, 2011 7:07 PM Subscribe
Could anyone recommend a site that reviews ebooks not just on the merits of their content, but on how well they're presented?
My Google skills are failing me here, so I'm hoping someone knows what I'm after. When it comes to DVDs and BluRays, it's not that hard to find sites that review the presentation of the film and not just the film itself. Something like this MichaelDVD review (sorry about the film selection, it was the first link on the front page!)
I'm in the mode now of almost exclusively buying ebooks instead of paperbacks, but I've been fairly disappointed by some basic and obvious formatting errors in the books I've bought. Most recently my copy of A Dance with Dragons from the Kindle Store had a glaring error at the start of every chapter, and what seemed like line break errors at various places throughout the text.
So does anybody know of a site that reviews or collects reviews which either focus exclusively on, or regularly set aside a section of the review to discuss the quality of the ebook's presentation?
Thanks.
My Google skills are failing me here, so I'm hoping someone knows what I'm after. When it comes to DVDs and BluRays, it's not that hard to find sites that review the presentation of the film and not just the film itself. Something like this MichaelDVD review (sorry about the film selection, it was the first link on the front page!)
I'm in the mode now of almost exclusively buying ebooks instead of paperbacks, but I've been fairly disappointed by some basic and obvious formatting errors in the books I've bought. Most recently my copy of A Dance with Dragons from the Kindle Store had a glaring error at the start of every chapter, and what seemed like line break errors at various places throughout the text.
So does anybody know of a site that reviews or collects reviews which either focus exclusively on, or regularly set aside a section of the review to discuss the quality of the ebook's presentation?
Thanks.
Best answer: I don't know of any specific site, but I do work in publishing, and I can tell you that a lot of these types of errors are due to the device - I just had to deal with one where Amazon said the origin font was fine, but it wouldn't render any double F's and a couple of other characters, making the entire e-book absolutely worthless. The problem was only on the Kindle - it looks fine as is on Nook, Apple, Sony, Kobo, and any PC-based reader other than Amazon's Kindle reader.
That's the problem with e-book conversions right now - there's no way a publisher can test every file on every version of every device out there. It's going to look bad on some of them, and it happens most frequently with Amazon because their device is the most readily available and because they have proprietary software that other devices don't use.
They do have a 7-day return policy on e-books.
posted by peanut_mcgillicuty at 8:09 PM on November 7, 2011 [2 favorites]
That's the problem with e-book conversions right now - there's no way a publisher can test every file on every version of every device out there. It's going to look bad on some of them, and it happens most frequently with Amazon because their device is the most readily available and because they have proprietary software that other devices don't use.
They do have a 7-day return policy on e-books.
posted by peanut_mcgillicuty at 8:09 PM on November 7, 2011 [2 favorites]
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by OHenryPacey at 8:04 PM on November 7, 2011