Kevin's Watch

Is anyone else having problems buying the Second Chronicles for Kindle?
The Amazon web site just says it is not currently available but the publisher tells me it is available and they can see it. I have purchased the First and Last Chronicles no problem - it is just the Second.

Being from NZ I can't buy from most other online sources such as Books On Board or EBooks.com for pathetic reasons I don't understand.

Be Welcome to the Watch, macker.
Be Well Come and True.

We have several Watchers in New Zealand; perhaps they can help you out when they see your predicament.

In the meantime, come introduce yourself in the Say Hello in Here thread up in The Summonsing.

Donaldson recently wrote on his website that he's been jammed up getting White Gold Weilder proofed for e-text, what with finishing the Last Chronicles and all that. (He's been proofing and fixing mistakes personally, since some other e-books of his have come out in various states of deplorable.)

But The Wounded Land and The One Tree should be available. It shows up in amazon.com --- but not amazon.co.uk. Which seems to me that it's an issue with the US rights and the International rights being split up between different publishers. I wasn't aware of this issue.

Lot's of other kindle users around. Look around, post around, maybe someone has worked out how to do this.

Sorry to bump an older thread, but is there any way to correct all the typos in the Kindle version of the chronicles?

I mean, a typo here and there is nothing... but when they start calling one of the Ravers Herein and they call Covenant the White Gold Wider... it's a bit tough to read

I've been reading books on my Kindle for years and I've never seen one so riddled with typos. Do they ever do corrections? Can you download those somehow?

My ebook copies of the first chronicles from the Apple bookstore are also riddled with typos that take you out of the moment.

Yeah, I'm about halfway through LFB and it is getting worse the further I go.

Donaldson was very dissapointed with the way the first Chronicles came out. So he proofed the Second Chronicles himself. I guess he missed a few ...

I keep telling people: ebooks will be the death of literature, and they keep telling me, "you don't understand, it's soooo convenieeeeent! "

Whelp, that's what convenience gets you: an inferior product. And Amazon does not care about your satisfaction. Donaldson said they actual outsource the proofing to India. That's right. If you are lucky, someone with English as a second language will be proofing these books and, well you see the result.

You could complain to customer service, but they outsource that also... so good luck with that. You could demand a refund, and you may even get it. And if enough people complain, I imagine the chronicles will be pulled off the market... why spend money correcting existing ebooks when other people buy plenty of other terrible ebooks?

Nothing beats the dead tree version.

And, I'll get off my soapbox now

I have intense visualization powers that really are worst case, like watching a movie, and best case almost like I am physically there. They don't work with ebooks or audiobooks! Dead Trees forever indeed!

Related note, I am pimping this series out to someone, and she insists on pdf versions...and free ones at that. Is there any place like that around? Like...a legal one? I found a site that says if you are a member you can download the books for free but...y'know. The internet is one giant pyramid scam.

Orlion wrote:I keep telling people: ebooks will be the death of literature, and they keep telling me, "you don't understand, it's soooo convenieeeeent! "

Whelp, that's what convenience gets you: an inferior product. And Amazon does not care about your satisfaction. Donaldson said they actual outsource the proofing to India. That's right. If you are lucky, someone with English as a second language will be proofing these books and, well you see the result.

You could complain to customer service, but they outsource that also... so good luck with that. You could demand a refund, and you may even get it. And if enough people complain, I imagine the chronicles will be pulled off the market... why spend money correcting existing ebooks when other people buy plenty of other terrible ebooks?

Nothing beats the dead tree version.

And, I'll get off my soapbox now

Absolutely nothing in this is unique or restricted to e-book proofing. There is nothing except existing standards of practice that dictates that recycled-electron books are proofread in outsourced English-challlenged markets or that pulp-printed ones are not. The barriers preventing physical books getting their texts quality-assured in places like India are no more and no less tall than those that are posited to force e-books to be checked for error in those regions.

Nor are US natives all that literate. Judging by the quality of writing for many local newpapers there is a lot of sloppy writing being put out there and being tolerated by the relevant readership. Even more disturbing is the spelling, grammar, punctuation and composistion skill evidenced by letters home from schoolteachers and school administrators. Abysmal writing is rife among those supposedly educating the next generation of writers.

Dismissing e-books or blaming the problems on offshore English skills is wrongheaded and short sighted. Kindle texts are not fundamentally inferior to bound books. Material written or proofread next door is not automatically more correct than that which was composed or edited half a world away. The issue is far more complicated and pervasive...

I've had plenty of print books with terrible copy editing. Including some with errors that made me think the book had been scanned into a computer from print to make the proofs. The paper book I'm reading right now keeps dropping quotation marks and parentheses.

Another thing worth mentioning: a significant aspect of this problem is in taking a book published in the 70s, and generating an e-book version.

My understanding is that there is no electronic version of the original books. They had to actually scan physical pages. So you see errors that are prone to the scan process, such as confusing "in" with "m" and "n" with "ri". Then it is editted (in that outsourced Indian sweatshop) with the hope of reproducing the original book.

Any book published now, or recently, would not face that complication. There would be an electronic version which is used for both the paper and electronic forms. It would be editted only a single time, and with a more competent editting department.

So I think that the notion that e-books must be inferior with respect to typos is only true in certain situations, such as the First Chronicles. There may be an overall decline in quality in the whole publishing industry, but it's probably not skewed toward e-books generally.

I just wish they'd let you correct them, even if in only your copy. Some of them are really maddening LOL