[Dragaera] Need a passage from "Iorich"

[Michael Wojcik]

On 2013-01-29 21:17, Eric Shupps wrote:
> I'm not an overly big fan of certain texts on the Kindle but the
> convenience outweighs everything else for me. I travel a lot so my Kindle
> is indispensable. The Taltos novels are fine but the Paarfi books somehow
> read better in regular print. It seems that shorter works with less dense
> word structure are more suited to an e-reader format; with their more
> complex sentence structure and larger words, Paarfi's works seem chopped up
> in electronic format. Maybe that's just me but I can tell you one thing for
> an absolute fact - nobody (including my aforementioned daughter) has ever
> become an accidental Brust fan because they saw your Kindle/Nook/iPad
> sitting on your desk. And you'll never experience the joy of an unexpected
> find or that intoxicating smell of old books browsing around on iTunes. 

Also, the transfer quality can vary enormously. I just got my Kindle and
don't have any Brust on it yet, but I bought a couple of Pratchett books
and the difference between them was striking. _The Fifth Elephant_ was
fine, but _Soul Music_ was riddled with typographical and formatting
errors, and there was something inherently broken with the encoding: when I
finished the book, it hung my Kindle and I had to cold-boot it to get it
working again.

Most of the Kindle editions I've seen lack much of the peripheral text you
get with print editions - blurbs, sometimes the author bio, even in some
cases indicia (publication information). That's annoying, even though you
can generally find that material online.

The Mobi format used by the Kindle also doesn't handle footnotes terribly
well, at least for non-touchscreen devices; you have to move the cursor to
the footnote symbol in order to read the note (so in effect they're
endnotes, not footnotes). I have no idea why there isn't at least an option
to render them as footnotes, which is trivial in an electronic edition. I
don't offhand recall any use of footnotes in Brust's novels, but it's an
annoyance with the Diskworld books.

That said, it is marvelously convenient. Like Eric, I continue to buy the
books I really like in print (and I'll probably continue to read them first
in that form), but some I've now purchased in electronic form as well.

-- 
Michael Wojcik
Micro Focus
Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University