enhanced ebooks and Homestead

I don't mean to post every time I have something to whine about. Really, I don't. So here's (1) an announcement and (2) a… discourse on enhanced ebooks.

The ebook rights to Homestead were never sold to any publisher, so with my agent's help I'm revising it for ebook release. Don't ask me about a timeline, because I have no idea.

The reasons I am pleased:

1. I get a chance to revise some small infelicities (generally an impossibility past a certain point)

2. As it's an ebook, I can add lotsa stuff (insofar as copyright is not an issue). Which means, (or I thought it meant) photos, appendices, etc. In theory.

The trouble:

Ebook publishing is in its cranky toddler stage. Nobody agrees on anything, everybody fights to have things done their way. You can't do Y on Kindle (but you can on Nook); you can't do x on Kindle or Nook, but you can … you get the picture. So progress is slow and painful.

Given the medium, the following should be possible (and you can explore this topic in more detail here):

1. images (maps, photos, illustrations)

2. images linked to explanatory material in an index

3. names linked to a list of characters, a family tree, or similar

4. words linked to specific definitions

5. FOOTNOTES. Footnotes are not evil. Footnotes are the best and most helpful of friends. Reading Pride and Prejudice and still don't know what Bingley is going on about when he mentions 'white soup' — a footnote would tell you. In a big hardcover annotated edition it's a pain to find the footnote, but on an electronic page? You need to wonder about white soup no longer.

Very few of these things (and others I haven't mentioned) are available with any consistency or quality across ebook platforms. Even worse, in their greedy rush to capitalize on the new market, publishers are scanning books and putting them out there without proofreading. Without even letting authors proofread. The results range from the horrific (examples discussed here) to the inconvenient and annoying.

Case in point: I was reading the Kindle edition of Tied to the Tracks, and I ran across a typo that really, really should have jumped out at somebody (and isn't in the print version). More irritating, most double returns — which signal a shift in story scene — were just deleted, which means you get tossed willy nilly from one POV to another and sit there for a moment going WHA? If I do this with a book I wrote, I can hardly imagine what it's like for anybody else.

Can I just contact Amazon and say, hey, errors. How can I fix 'em?

Apparently not. At least, if there is a way, it is well and truly hidden.

If publishers are going to charge as much for an ebook as a print one, they had best get their act together. I will not pay $12 for an ebook of Pride and Prejudice (and I don't have to, as it's free in most places) but I would consider paying $5 for an annotated P&P with clickable links to interesting information.

This is especially relevant when you're reading something like The Brothers Karamazov, which must weigh five pounds in print edition. Translated from the Russian, you need clarification now and then. You need hints about historical and geographical backstory. In this case, you absolutely need links to character lists because by god, the Russians do love long names and they squeeze as many as they can into a single page.

A well done enhanced ebook might even be a way to entice the otherwise timid into trying big scary books. Worried about feeling dumb given the vocabulary? Nobody has to know if or how often you clicked the dictionary button. Confused about geography in the Near East? That little pop up map will get you to the point where you even know one -stan from another.

Here's another part of the problem. You search on line for an ebook edition of X. You get 230 hits, but the pages are set up so it's impossible to compare them. You need to know: abridged/unabridged (and this means also– are the author's notes, acknowledgements etc there, or have they been cut)? translator? clickable table of contents? clickable notes or footnotes? how carefully proofread?

This means that you can't really know which editions are truly well done enhanced editions, and which are donkey poop.  Not a good situation. And yes, you can download a sample chapter — but I am not willing to read and compare 40 editions of the first chapter of War and Peace. I want the bookseller to do that for me.

I had such plans for the ebook of Homestead, but it seems like most of it is impossible. Grrrr.