Beranda » Apathy » Barnes and Noble ebooks » Formatting ebooks » Publishing » Reading » The Nook Gets No Respect » Authors and publishers are treating the Nook like it is the red-headed stepchild of ereaders

I just finished an excellent book written by an author that I will choose at this point not to name. I read the book in three days. The publisher is an independent press. First some background.

I own two kinds of e-readers. The first is an iPad and the second is a Barnes and Noble Nook Color.

I buy a lot of books on the Nook because I cash in my Discover Card rewards for gift certificates to Barnes and Noble. Plus, with one of their stores just right across the street from where I live, and the demise of Borders, I felt that I should do something to keep Amazon from destroying the last big brick and mortar bookstore chain in America. Every little bit helps.

So...I buy Barnes and Noble ebooks. I buy quite a few of them.

Chances are, if you're an author with access to your own sales and you mysteriously see one Nook sale next to the hundred kindle sales you have...that one customer is me. Again, I get gift certificates for just using my Discover Card so in a sense, they're free to me and FREE IS GOOD.

However, even though I represent only 1% of your sales, it does NOT give you a license to shit all over the end product. I'm getting sick of it.

In this book put out by independent publisher above that I finished just tonight, a page ended mid-sentence with the word "the". I turned the page to continue to read and it was a whole new paragraph. What the hell? I can only assume by the context of what was going on that either an entire paragraph was omitted, or an entire page was left out. Okay...big deal, right? It gets better. I'm reading along and then pages start repeating over and over and over. I have to drag the bar to advance past them and then backpedal to where I was to continue the story because there are so many of the same page inserted in the Nook formatting.

But it isn't just them. Another independent publisher had a book that had the author's name inserted mid-sentence at the bottom of a page (this isn't a spelling problem but a formatting one). And I've come across foreign letters only represented by empty squares. I have to infer from the context of the sentence what word was used. Also, I've bought self-pubbed books who have the screwiest indents (either omitted or glaringly huge) in the Nook but their kindle editions apparently are just fine. And when I say screwy...I mean REALLY F'IN SCREWY so that the book is damn near unreadable. I don't care that the author goes back and corrects it. I'm not going to buy the book twice to download it. Burn me once, shame on you.

You know who hasn't messed up on Nook formatting? Anything done by the BIG SIX.

All of their books are fine. Gee...I wonder why that is? Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 looks pristine. R.A. Salvatore's book that I'm reading has no repeated pages. George R.R. Martin's books look great. Even old school books like Isaac Asimov's Foundation look passable (and they probably don't make money formatting his books for the Nook anyway). I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the reason their books don't suck on Nook is because they choose not to make them suck.

I think I know why this is happening. It's called "Apathy". Small publishers and self-pubbed authors are like, "Amazon is the only thing that matters. Kindle formatting is the only thing that makes us money." Well screw you. I'm a consumer, and I own a Nook, and I would like a little respect. Either do it well or don't even make your book available on the Nook...period. But I have five friends that own Nooks as well, and if you don't make your book available to me...that's five friends that will never hear about it (and one of 'em is part of a small book club).