I’ve had my Kindle for two months or so now and I love it. However I’ve had some strange formatting problems with some of my books and I don’t know if it’s the books or the Kindle that’s the problem.
A few of F Paul Wilson’s books did the following, when there was an italicized word the rest of the text would change over to being italicized. This would continue for ‘pages’ until I either stopped reading and it went to sleep, I forced it to sleep, or I jumped to some other point in the book and went back to where I was at. Very annoying and happened a lot.
Also in a few of Wilson’s books I would get a word that would be separated with some gibberish in the middle, it took me two books to figure out it was supposed to be a word. It would look like ‘Import&anant’ instead of important.
I got a book from Project Gutenberg, Peter Pan, and every so often, at least in the beginning the
text was center centered which of course was a pain to read.
Does anyone know if this is a Kindle problem or a problem with the file? I’ve been looking on the Kindle forums at Amazon but haven’t seen anything about it.
Did you purchase the ebook from the Amazon store? Or find it another way? Usually when you see things like that, it’s because the text in the original file didn’t use all the formatting tags that the kindle looks for. So for example the file might have had a [noparse]* and no *[/noparse],so it wouldn’t know when to stop italicizing a section until you basically turned it off and back on. Since you were past the point in the text where the opening bracket was, it didn’t keep italicising, but rather revered to the standard plain text.
I find this is common when I’ve convereted say a .pdf or .txt to a .mobi file. If this is happening to ebooks that you’ve purchased from amazon, I’d complain and see if they can offer you credit on the book, or maybe release a fixed version.
I had this problem occasionally with free books (most of the ones I get are from the free sites). I also had the problem where some extensive quoted material wouldn’t fit on the page and there was no way to scroll over to see the rest; then the rest of the book just stayed like that. I assumed it was just sloppy preparation of the e-book, but I never checked it out. I have certainly never had such a problem with a book I have paid for.
Roddy