Tolkien on the Kindle

[Ibrîniðilpathânezel]

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

That is, um, interesting... I have books that used to be my grandmothers, and they are still intact.... Why such a disrespect for books?

For myself, I have no disrespect for books, but a lot for the publishing industry. It isn't what it used to be, nor are most books. I myself own books that are quite old — the oldest is about 150 years old, and it's in better shape than a lot that are much newer. The materials and processes used to make books aren't what they once were; glues, paper, inks, everything has changed, and changed again. The high acid papers that were popular for many years have been replaced, by some publishers, but the inks that are more environmentally friendly also fade and rub away very quickly. The binding are cheap, as are the glues that hold them, and spines crack and pages fall out, sometimes before I've finished the first read of the book (and I'm not that hard on them).

The sloppiness of the publishing industry has slopped into ebooks. The only reason that so many ebooks are rife with "typos" are because the publishers didn't bother with having a human being proof them and clean up the code after conversion to the ebook's format. I know, because I've now made a few ebooks of my own, and am familiar with the programs and processes and what happens when one format is converted to another. Yes, it's easy to take a PDF file, send it through a conversion program, and voila! have an ebook, but the conversion process makes a horrible mess of things far too often. A person with a proper editing program needs to go through it and correct these things (many of which could be cleaned up simply by starting with an RTF file rather than a PDF). It's sad when I, who am asking nothing for my little twiddles of ebooks, take greater care with them than the publishers who are asking real money for them. It's not that hard to make a good clean ebook, but they obviously don't want to cut into profits by hiring someone to do a one-time proof and clean-up. Grr.

And I find it funny that here I am, one of the oldest people hereabouts, and yet one who has happily embraced technology, as it helps make up for many of my physical shortcomings, which grow greater with each passing year (and don't get me started on my recent six month bout with statin drug damage to my body, from which I am still slowly recovering. We're talking serious non-stop pain and near-crippling weakness for six freaking months!)