Comments on: Are iBooks Books Complete? I Bought One Missing Nearly 100 Pages

By: Hailey

Hailey — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 05:37:54 +0000

I have had lots of my ebooks showing a page amount but when I download then I’m missing parts. Parts that if you didn’t have the actual book to compare, you never know they were missing. How is the consumer to know if they’re actually getting all of the book if we don’t have a page number to compare to what we downloaded….frustrated!

By: kirk

kirk — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 07:41:14 +0000

When did you redownload it? The only review of the book (Apple has deleted the other negative reviews mentioning the missing section) says that there’s still a missing part, and it’s dated August 17.

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 00:04:00 +0000

I just ran into this problem after purchasing the book a few months ago but put off reading it. I went to redownload it and the problem has been resolved, however iBooks charged me again for the book, so I will still need to be contacting them for a refund.

By: James Gowan

James Gowan — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 18:12:30 +0000

I’m planning on finally reading that collection and I hate to hear that this content is missing.

However: Good thing it’s Stephen King. You can bet he’s heard of the problem at this point and will make sure it gets corrected. I think I’ll pop over to his website and send him an email or something. He’s so big that this will eventually get fixed.

By: Ian Wardell

Ian Wardell — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 20:18:51 +0000

I don’t understand this. How can they be allowed to sell a claimed unabridged novel which has almost 1/6th of that novel missing??

And surely people must be employed to proofread these ebooks?? They surely can’t simply be relying that the OCR will be accurate!

By: James

James — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:45:32 +0000

FYI, Apple hasn’t corrected the issue yet. I did the same download and the last 19 chapters of Section V are missing.

As with your experience, Apple directed me to download the book again.

By: Smitty

Smitty — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 15:46:56 +0000

I used to work for an ebook company, and these things can be a real bear to trace and fix. Add to that the issue of the publishers having to pay for conversion, and it may not get done. We had publishers that would send in files with horribly incorrect data (charts in lo-rez, tables in disarray, etc.) but their response was always “just get the book out” rather than deliver a quality product. I have little respect left for some major publishers as a result. (Not all of them, just some.)

As the “digital bookstore”, Apple has as much clout as your local B&N or Borders: they can apologize and refund your money, but they can’t magically produce sections of data that have not been delivered to them.

By: Chet Williams

Chet Williams — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 18:13:46 +0000

I have had the same thing happen before on TV shows where they fail to transfer over the entire show.

They forced me to re-download too but second-level support realized it was a problem with the source file submitted by the content owner. They pulled the episodes shortly thereafter.

By: Kara Sjoblom-Bay

Kara Sjoblom-Bay — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 16:27:05 +0000

Ugh – that is pretty lame. Sorry – we don’t think we can fix this, so we are just giving you your money back. Apparently they don’t get that you would rather have the complete book.

By: kirk

kirk — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 15:32:52 +0000

Anyone who’s following the comments, note the updates I’ve added to the original article…

By: renaud

renaud — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 01:48:16 +0000

For audio bocks, mâle sure you do ont crossfade your audiobook. It would fade out the end of the file and fade in the following one. Maybe this is whatnis happening to you?

By: kirk

kirk — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 21:34:45 +0000

Oh, I know it’s not Apple’s fault. But it is disturbing that this is relatively common, based on comments I’ve seen, both from Apple and from Amazon. I wonder if it is, as you say, just something the prevents the text from displaying. Since it’s DRMed, there’s no way of examining the file to find out.

By: freegame

freegame — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 21:29:42 +0000

I have read a handful of ebooks from which I also listened to the audio-book. The ebooks were fine, but the audio-books sometimes had a half a sentence or so missing at the end of a chapter. To make sure that i did not miss big parts I got the ebooks. they seem to be fine.

By: WaltFrench

WaltFrench — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:59:28 +0000

There may be a fault in the file that the publisher sends to Apple; that type of error might happen more in the early adopters’ files. I dunno what error-checking Apple insists on, but obviously Apple doesn’t have control over what content crosses their threshold.

Or, the ebook software may have a fault that causes it to stop displaying info that’s actually on your iPad. I’ve recently seen a PDF that is handled OK on my laptop, but that users claim stops abruptly on page 51 when viewed on the iPad. Very likely, this is actually a coding bug in the file also, but one which the iPad handles less well than the MacOSX software.

Either way, stay vigilant and complain to Apple if it happens more than once or twice, that their as-delivered quality control should put you on the payroll. They seem to like the JD Powers scores that they get and will probably pay attention.

By: kirk

kirk — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:28:18 +0000

Some of the typos I’ve seen in ebooks suggest that they are indeed scanning them, not converting existing files. But I haven’t bought any new ebooks, so maybe for the old ones they don’t have files.