Jules Verne Forum

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Re: Jules Verne E-Book Editions -- Nook

From: Tad Davis <taddavis~at~me.com>
Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 14:45:52 -0400
Cc: Jules Verne Forum <jvf~at~gilead.org.il>
To: Jules Verne Forum <jvf~at~gilead.org.il>

I've seen numerous ebooks, for both Kindle and Nook (at least in their iPhone incarnations), riddled with OCR errors. This has been true even when the books were recently published (and paid for) titles from big-name publishers.

In one case, virtually every time a capital O appeared, it was printed as facing parentheses. Capital Ds were printed as a capital I followed by a right parenthesis.

My biggest gripe about ebooks, however, and one that doesn't really apply to Verne, is the execrable formatting used for poetry. I realize the iPhone screen is small enough to make this challenging, but there are two simple rules that could be followed (and usually aren't): 1. Left-justify the line. Don't indent it like a block quote in HTML. There's little enough space as it is. 2. Use HANGING INDENTS if the line runs over.

Oh, and if you're representing something printed with different languages on facing pages, as with many editions of Dante, the correct way to do this is NOT to print one page of Italian followed by one page of English.

I should note, however, that Rick Walter's excellent Verne omnibus, as well as William Butcher's outstanding OUP titles, happily reside on my iPhone. Unlike their printed and well-thumbed counterparts, these are none the worse for their considerable wear.

Tad Davis
Received on Mon 23 May 2011 - 21:46:04 IDT

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