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ebook formatting problems
I have 3 O'Reilly ebooks and the formatting of all three is pretty terrible on Stanza, on the Iphone, or the desktop app. It's really just a jumble of text, and the reading is terribly disjointed by the obviously missing formatting. I've tried all three available formats and none are great.
Is it me? I hope so... the price of the ebooks isn't enough below the price of the hard copy to justify such a difference in quality. Please let me know if it's something I am doing wrong.
Is it me? I hope so... the price of the ebooks isn't enough below the price of the hard copy to justify such a difference in quality. Please let me know if it's something I am doing wrong.
I’m sad
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Inappropriate?Hi hope,
Can you tell me which titles you're dissatisfied with? We try hard to produce quality ebooks, and I'd like to better understand which ones you're having a bad experience with so I can investigate. If you can provide more detail about location within the book, that's extremely helpful. -
Inappropriate?thanks... I have "iPhone the Missing Manual", and just purchased "iPhone Hacks" and "Switching to the Mac Leopard Edition". I hope it's me... but they look awful!!
I’m thankful
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Inappropriate?
that could be what its supposed to look like... but I bet its not very similar to the print editon, especially missing images? I hope it's my setup, somehow. -
Inappropriate?The ebooks aren't really meant to match the print book (since they need to "reflow" for different screen sizes), though if you view the PDF version in Adobe Reader it will match the print version.
Stanza Desktop isn't really the best desktop reading app; you may find Bookworm (bookworm.oreilly.com) a better reading experience for EPUB, or Adobe Digital Editions.
For Stanza on the iPhone, you should make sure "show styles" is enabled under Settings->Display.
There's more on various devices and platforms at oreilly.com/ebooks. -
Inappropriate?they look exactly like that via Stanza on the iphone... I just used the desktop app to take the screenshot. I checked Stanza in the iPhone and it still looks terrible, even with 'show styles' on. I will investigate reading it as a pdf in some app other than Stanza, but disappointing. At least I know it's not me!
edited to add... ok, the epub file is much, much, much better. Thanks for the link to the /books page, I thought the pdf would be the best reading experience on Stanza- wrong. yay, Ican read my books now. thanks for the help.
I’m happy
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Inappropriate?PDF is intended to faithfully represent a printed page layout, so doesn't include the kind of information needed for a reading device to "reflow" the text for different screen sizes and/or font faces and sizes.
Those limitations were one of the primary motivating factors for the development of the EPUB standard, and EPUB is a much better choice for viewing the content on a small-screen device.
Glad you're able to now enjoy your O'Reilly ebooks! -
Inappropriate?How easy is it to read the index? Can you get from the index to the correct page?
I’m curious
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This answers the question
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Hi Fred,
I should clarify that most of our ebooks do have indexes (that include followable hyperlinks). We're not quite yet at 100% (particularly for titles that don't go through our standard full-XML workflow), but we are striving to include working indexes in as many ebooks as we can. -
Inappropriate?Most of our ebooks don't have indexes, since they're typically read on a device with full-text search. All internal links (for example, cross references to other chapters) are functioning hyperlinks that will take you to the correct location (since "page" isn't really the right term when you can resize the text).
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