Ebooks missing features of printed books

[Chip]

I am reading house leaves on my Kindle voyager . It seems that all of the cool features found in the printed copy of this book are missing from the e-book edition . Is this true of most e-books ? Is there anyway to enable these features?

[Eric]

I'm not familiar with the book you're reading, so I have no idea what "cool features" of the printed copy are "missing" in the ebook.

I have the same type of Kindle. You're not going to get anything in color, and covers and internal artwork are going to be in greys and blacks. Things like maps, drawings of the city where the book takes place, etc., are going to be compressed into a very small space to fit the screen and so aren't as effective or easy to read as "full size" in the print version.

I suggest this is just a trade-off. You have the convenience of hundreds if not thousands of books at your fingertips in your Kindle, which is primarily a text device, as opposed to lugging multiple books around while you're out and about before deciding which one to read.

Just my USD .02.

Eric

[Nell]

If I'm reading a book on my Kindle that has a map or family tree or similar drawings, I may look for the book at the local library and copy that feature from the print version. That way I can refer to the full-size version while I read the e-book.

[Chip]

I appreciate the reply. It seems like a real drag to miss out on many features found in print copies, but as you say, there is a trade off, ebooks are compact and so forth.

[Tobias]

Illustrations work fine in ebooks, but not optimally. House of Leaves, however, is impossible to render as an ebook (except as a PDF file which would lack any of the features exclusive to ebooks, like having the text reflowed at will by changing the font or font size, etc). Ebooks are best for books comprised solely of regular text.

(House of Leaves has lots of footnotes within footnotes, mirrored text, colored text, text flowed to form images, etc)

[Toni]

Nell wrote: "If I'm reading a book on my Kindle that has a map or family tree or similar drawings, I may look for the book at the local library and copy that feature from the print version. That way I can refer..."

Good solution, I think

[Toni]

Tobias wrote: "Illustrations work fine in ebooks, but not optimally. House of Leaves, however, is impossible to render as an ebook (except as a PDF file which would lack any of the features exclusive to ebooks, l..."

"House of Leaves" is a tour de force of a printed book. I just read it last year and loved it, for both the story and the graphical presentation. The printed format fit the storyline. It would lose much of its impact as an ebook.

[YouKneeK]

Chip wrote: "It seems like a real drag to miss out on many features found in print copies, but as you say, there is a trade off, ebooks are compact and so forth."

I’m coming to this thread a little late, but I’d argue that the typical e-book has more features than a typical paperback. I can touch words on a paperback until I poke a hole through the page, but it will never give me definitions, wiki articles, or foreign language translations. On my Kindle, I can run quick and comprehensive searches to refresh my memory about a character I’ve forgotten, not just in my current book, but in all the books on my Kindle including previous books in the series. This is a great benefit for those of use with holes in our heads and/or who read epic fantasy or other books with tons of characters.

It’s like anything else in life – we always have to make choices between two or more things that have different pros and cons, and sometimes we have to sacrifice benefits of one thing because the benefits of the other thing outweigh those of the first. Car choices, meal choices, vacation destination choices, you name it. Why not our reading format choices?

I read almost exclusively e-books for the reasons mentioned above, among others, but I make exceptions when a physical book will better meet my needs for a particular set of circumstances. A couple of the illustrated novels in the Discworld series would be one example. Textbooks would be another, particularly when I might need to analyze a chart or graph on one page while simultaneously reading related text on a different page.

But I’ll end this wall of text by saying I do think it should be clearly stated on the Amazon page if the Kindle edition lacks critical features from the physical edition, so readers can make an informed decision.

[YouKneeK]

Nell wrote: "If I'm reading a book on my Kindle that has a map or family tree or similar drawings, I may look for the book at the local library and copy that feature from the print version.

That’s a good solution. You can also find the map online sometimes. That’s usually the first thing I do -- search the Internet for the map. If I find it, I print it out to keep near my Kindle. If I can’t find it online, I’ll open the book up to the map page on my tablet (larger screen, and easier to zoom in/out) and keep it within arm’s reach while I read the book itself on my Kindle.

These solutions won’t work for anybody who doesn’t have a printer and/or a tablet, but they work well for me.

[CBRetriever]

Just Kids

This book clearly states:

Due to copyright restrictions, this eBook may not contain all of the images available in the print edition.

as such, I appreciated that the publisher chose to add it to the product blurb.

The copyright issue is why a lot of books do not have the illustrations, maps and/or photos of the print version. They were in some cases licensed to be reproduced just in that edition of a book (a digital version is a separate edition). And some artists/photographers are paranoid about any digital reproduction of their works thinking that they could be copied and used w/o them getting credit/paid