Re: Fooled again! eBooks and truth in labelling

I'm afraid this is an old story. Publishers have been fudging the length of books almost since the dawn of moveable type.

There are, of course, a lot of reasons for this. The primary reason is simply to adjust the length of the book to fit evenly over the number signatures in the book. (Signatures are the pages made from folding a single sheet of paper -- generally into 16 or 32 pages. Traditionally printed books are therefore usually composed of a number of pages divisible by 16 or 32).

But, of course, there are other reasons for adjusting things like leading (space between lines), margins, word spacing, kerning (space between letters) and today even letter width. Sometimes publishers ask book designers to tighten up the book to reduce the page count as a money saving measure. Other times, as you have apparently seen, publishers have the book lengthened to beef it out and make it look like more than it is.

Most of the time, however, book designers adjust these things in an attempt to make the book look better.


Of course, the major difference is that much of the time, at least when you purchase a book in a bookstore, you can open the book and see if the leading, margins, etc. are unusual. But if you are buying the book online, you're in the same boat as buyers of e-books.

Kent


At 7:57 PM -0500 2/10/08, Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
>For what it's worth, this problem is not solely limited to eBooks.
>
>Plain old ordinary print publishers are very creative in the way they
>vary type size, line spacing, and margins. I don't have a micrometer
>but I'm almost convinced that they vary paper thickness, too. The
>result is that a row of shiny mass-market paperbacks sitting in a
>drugstore or airport book rack can look at least roughly the same in
>heft and thickness, but vary by a factor of _at least_ four in actual
>content.
>
>I was personally fooled--and scandalized--by a book by Stephen King,
>"The Colorado Kid," which had the appearance of a paperback novel. I
>went to the trouble of estimating word count and came up with a rough
>total of 40,000, barely a novella. In contrast, King's "Different
>Seasons" packs a word total of just about four times as much into a
>roughly similar-looking package.
>
>And, of course, some of the paperbacks that look thick also have
>smallish type.
>
>300,000-word paperbacks are not unusual.
>
>Compact discs--after people hollered bloody murder in the early days--
>now uniformly give their playing time in minutes and seconds on their
>covers. Books, print AND electronic, ought to state their word count.
>
>



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