Does Penguin Care About eBooks?

I’m a big reader. As you can see here, and on my Reading Henry James blog, I read a wide variety of books. While this is not a book blog, I write about books, in addition to my writings about Macs, iPods and iTunes, because I’m a book lover.

I’m very interested in ebooks, because I think that, in some ways, they represent the future of reading. I’m not giving up paper books (yes, in the future, we’ll have to use two words to describe “traditional” books), but for some books I’m going e.

Lately, I’ve been wanting to re-read James Joyce. Long one of my favorite writers, Joyce is one of the masters of the 20th century. But I hadn’t read his works in many years. The announcement of a new edition of Finnegans Wake reminded me that I should go back and re-read all of Joyce’s work. (Yes, all; I have read Finnegans Wake once before.)

Last night, after reading a brief biography of Joyce by Edna O’Brien (is it really out of print already?), I decided to start re-reading Dubliners. I had an old copy of the book, in a mass-market paperback edition, whose pages were yellowed and cracking, and which smelled musty. So I figured, hey, why not grab an ebook and read it on my iPod touch? I checked on Amazon, and found this Penguin edition for just $2. So I bought it.

I’ve long bought Penguin Classics editions because of the quality of the texts, and the generally good paper and typography. I have some Penguin books that are decades old and that are still in fine condition. So with two serious choices – I know, I could have grabbed a free version or a 99-cent version – the Penguin or the Modern Library – I chose the Penguin.

What a mistake! Not only were there a half-dozen typos (or scan-os) in the introduction alone, but the way the “book” is laid out is terrible. Here, a picture (or two) is worth a thousand words:

The above are two subsequent pages as they display on my iPod touch.

Except in the introduction, where the spacing between paragraphs is correct, the entire text of the book is like this, with extra spacing between each paragraph. I’d expect to see this in free ebooks, but not one from Penguin. It seems as though they paid no attention at all to the text and layout of the ebook, even though the actual text of the traditional book was carefully proofed and laid out. (And, in the case of a book like this, they carefully chose their source text.)

I’ve actually never seen this on other Kindle books I’ve read. If this is the future of ebooks from some publishers – in this case Penguin – readers will be very careful about which books they buy. It is quite disturbing to read like this, and this is certainly not what the author intended. With a classic of this type, it is important to get the text right.

So, Penguin, if you’re serious about ebooks, you’d better take them seriously. Readers won’t choose your books when there are other choices (for classics), and I’ll certainly look elsewhere in the future.

Note: I did download samples for both the Penguin and Modern Library editions of this book. Since the Penguin edition’s sample showed only the introduction, where the line spacing was correct, I had no clue that it was incorrect in the remainder of the book.