How Macmillan Lost A $9.99 Impulse Sale

[telophase]

So I'm feeling vaguely Roman, as I have convinced myrialux to watch Rome Season 1 with me so I can finally watch season 2 without worrying about spoilers for him should he be in the room at the time.* Which means I was thinking about buying a novel/mystery or two about classical Rome, and therefore downloaded the sample of John Maddox Roberts' SPQR I: The King's Gambit to my Kindle.



Click to embiggen.



Page after page after page of that font? I don't care how good the book is, I'm not reading that.

I also downloaded the sample of the nonfiction Caesar: The Life of a Colossus by Adrian Goldworthy, which has proved so far to be entertaining, readable, and in a non-stupid font. I'll probably end up getting that after I get through one or two more of the four or five books in the To-Read list on the Kindle. :)


* I ruined season 1 for him already. I told him Julius Caesar died.**


** That was a joke.

Comments

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my favorite use of the 'sample this book' feature is to see whether the ebook has an eyesearing font or is horribly formatted or was obviously dumped to OCR without editing. (One book I sampled has '1' for pretty much every sentence-starting 'I'. Come on, guys, that's not even trying.)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I read one with a character named Kemal who was frequently referred to as Kernal. And as he was an antagonist to the main character, it took me a while to realize it was an OCR error and not the main character deliberately mispronouncing his name.

[seawolf10.livejournal.com]

I never found the font problematic, but I had a print copy, which was probably easier to focus on than that little screen.

Your call.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

If you look at the embiggened version, you'll see that the thinnest parts of each letter in the font are gone, leading to letters full of gaps.

Mild edit. Man, maybe I should cough up for a paid account.

[seawolf10.livejournal.com]

Oops. Sorry, guess that's what I get for being lazy and not zooming in. I certainly wouldn't want to try and read that, so I can't blame you for avoiding it either.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

That's a beautiful example of How Not To Do It.

What is that, New Century Schoolbook processed through an Etch-a-Sketch?

Hm, if there's a character named Macro, I hope he has a cat.