Surprise revival in UK printed book sales, with ebooks dipping

[Abiatha_Swelter]

@Glaurung

Publishers that would never dream of issuing a book with the author’s name wrong on the spine, issue ebooks with the author’s name wrong in the metadata. Vonda N. McIntyre is an author. McIntyre, Vonda N is how you sort the name, not how you spell it. Collect books from two or three different publishers by the same author, and like as not you’ll see two or three different versions of the name in an app’s list of authors, with only one of them being right.

We work with a couple of different conversion vendors, and it is true that they sometimes screw this up despite fairly explicit instructions, which they tend to ignore. In the epub metadata record, you can include a ‘file as’ attribute on the display name, but it doesn’t always get added correctly. And then you are at the mercy of the software to read it correctly. Apple iBooks, for instance, will decide to only show the first name listed of a multi-author work in the running head. One of my major accomplishments was getting Apple to fix an iTunes bug that dropped characters with diacritics in the metadata. It’s a constant struggle.

I don’t buy ebooks.

[phuzz]

strip-mall big boxes, full of trashy ancillary merch and empty of foot traffic

Not to be confused with Ancillary Mercy, which is a great book.

never screw up the UI on a paper book and lose my place due to accidental taps

Yeah, but I’m sure I’m not the only person to drop a paper book and lose my place (or the bookmark falls out in your bag or something).

As for crappy tags and metadata, I add or fix all of that myself when I import the ebook, in the same way I tag and name every mp3 I have according to my own tastes. For me this is actually part of the fun. I’m weird I know.

[adonai]

@Daneyul

The big publisher’s ebooks have shot up in price, making it kind of inevitable that their ebooks sales would lessen

100%. I’ve bought more paper books than ebooks in the last couple of years, as in some cases the ebooks is more expensive than the actual copy. Mindbogglingly stupid move by publishers.

[fidgit]

I just wanted to comment that I really miss Stanza. I’ve still got it on my old ipod touch 3rd gen, because it can’t be updated beyond a point where Stanza stopped working. I was pretty mad when it died off, especially since Amazon did the same thing to mobipocket, my first ebook-app love.

That app was just so good, and super customisable (I would often tweak the text and background colour between books, it helped make books feel very separate and unique, which helped if I was reading a lot of the same type of quite specific sub-genre, such as space-war stories). The kindle app (which had it basis in mobipocket) is so woefully under-featured in comparison.