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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
No Bargain, Even at One Dollar,
By
This review is from: Tales from the Arabian Nights (Kindle Edition)
In general, I think it's a great service when Amazon takes a eBook that is available for free in the public domain and makes it available at the Kindle store for a nominal charge. Usually, this means that the Table of Contents is made active and formatting inconsistencies are corrected. Also it makes the Kindle book store more attractive by making it more of a one-stop shopping experience, not to mention allowing Amazon to increase the Kindle-ready book count.
However, in my opinion, this book is of little value and diminishes the attractiveness of the Kindle as the original public domain source was one of many that have "fixed line breaks" meaning that every line ends with a carriage return. Amazon made no effort to correct this major formatting problem. The result for the Kindle reader is that every other line is just a couple words long, often a single word. This makes reading the book far less enjoyable and more difficult to read. This problem is not corrected by changing font size and also exists for the other 99 cent version of the "Arabian Nights" translated by Sir Richard Burton ("The Arabian Nights: The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, all 16 volumes, with active table of contents"). Fortunately, there is one properly formatted, complete version available from Amazon also for [...] cents, "The Arabian Nights Entertainments - Complete", by Anonymous, which is quite good. There are also a couple of other abridged versions for under $[...]. While I haven't found a complete, properly formatted Burton translation available for free from the Internet, [...], does contain a free Kindle-ready complete version of the "Arabian Nights" translated by Jonathon Scott, that is excellent. I have also been able to largely correct a Burton version by limiting the breaks to each sentence, instead of every line, which is FAR more readable. I will e-mail it to anyone who requests it at my gmail.com address (screen name "atisch", file size ~760 KB) I believe that it would be a good move on Amazon's part, to either: -only charge for public domain (PD) works that are properly formatted, or -charge a nominal fee, but clearly note serious formatting limitations, or -simply point the reader to the PD source when there are such issues. I believe the last option could be of tremendous public relations value (reminiscent of classic movie, "Miracle on 34th Street", where Kris Kringle, working for Macy's tells a customer that a toy not available at Macy's is available at Gimbels.) In addition, I would recommend first getting the Sample Version--when available--to check of the formatting, as well as comparing translations for non-English classics. The Kindle is a superb first version of an eBook reader capable of changing the publishing industry. I'm enjoying mine immensely. In the spirit of wanting to see it succeed, it's as important to get the small things right as the large.
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