Re:Stories and lessons from working with Jeff Bezos on the o...
by WalterBright on Sunday August 02, 2020 @04:27PM
(#24031431)
> very shoddily digitized versions
Funny you should mention that. I usually watch old movies with the closed captioning on, and it's clear the captioning isn't even proofread. Lots of times it will be a sound-alike word that doesn't fit in the sentence. Perhaps they employ non-native English speakers to type in the text.
Re:Stories and lessons from working with Jeff Bezos on the o...
by kevin_thibedeau on Sunday August 02, 2020 @01:11PM
(#24029938)
You need a 300ppi display. Then you won't have a reason to complain about quality. The Paperwhite 3 looks amazing.
Re:Stories and lessons from working with Jeff Bezos on the o...
by atombender on Sunday August 02, 2020 @01:16PM
(#24029963)
How does resolution address any of my complaints?
But my biggest complaint is that Kindle made books ugly. I love beautiful typography, and bad typography can ruin a reading experience. Reading Kindle books are like stepping back in time to low-quality mass-market paperbacks.
Using John Crowley's Little, Big as an example:
* Original print version: https://i.imgur.com/pLmQyja.jpg
* Kindle: https://i.imgur.com/xRu0eLo.jpg
* Kindle Cloud Reader: https://i.imgur.com/GDqCD9u.jpg
There's absolutely nothing stopping us from being able to render the book beautifully with the right font. In this particularly egregious example, they didn't even bother to include the ornamentations. That's one thing, but those underlined chapter headings? They didn't even try.
As I understand it, modern e-books are just HTML, designed to be reformatted to different screens. There appears to be limited support for fonts, and whatever Kindle uses to render text is awful.
Another frustration about the quality of the books is how a lot of older fiction is only available in very shoddily digitized versions that don't even use correct typography ("smart" quotes, em dashes, indented paragraphs, etc.).