What I mean by spotting a bad ebook is being able to recognize if you should spend your hard earned money, even if it is just 99 cents, on a poorly formatted ebook. You may think you are getting a deal with these ebooks but your time and frustration are worth searching for a decently formatted ebook.
Though, I must say that Amazon, who I am going to focus on, has a great thing going, the Kindle is awesome, I love reading on my Kindle plus it has allowed me to have a small side business. But after looking at my competition in the Kindle Ebook world over the past 3 years I have seen a lot of junk that is published. The down side I see is that these books may remain on Amazon for eternity and frankly I am surprised that Amazon allows a lot of junk they do to be sold on the Kindle. Not that the contents of the book itself are junk but the formatting of the book.
So without further ado I here are my top four indicators of a poorly formatted ebook. Check out two ebook version links of Thomas Watson’s A Body of Divinity for an example.
Quality Ebook vs. Bad Ebook
1. Only a picture of the author is the cover of the book.
When you see only a picture or a painting for the cover usually but not necessarily of the author stay away from it. If the publisher can’t spend ten minutes in Photoshop or Gimp (my choice cause it’s free) to create a decent cover with the name and author of the book on it I doubt they spent much time formatting the book.
2. Page numbers are in the book.
I am not talking about the page numbers in a well designed ebook that correspond to the actual page of the printed book. But when you view or download a sample of the book and it contains page numbers I would bet my money that it is junk. Most likely what the publisher did is take a PDF which they found on the internet and uploaded it to Amazon (which they allow for some reason) without any special formatting for the ebook whatsoever. See below for an example.
3. The Table of Contents is not hyperlinked to the chapters & sections.
If the Table of Contents is not hyperlinked then if you want to get to a specific chapter you either must 1) turn every page to get where you are going, or 2) type in a specific phrase to get there. You can tell a Table of Contents is hyperlinked if it is blue, highlighted, or underlined.
4. The Table of Contents is not immediately available to navigate to/there is no Table of Contents.
If you cannot choose Go To -> Table of Contents then you can’t easily find the table of contents and go to where you want to in the book. And you will have the same problem you have in #3.
I would love to hear you thoughts so if you have any or if you can think of any other indicators of bad ebooks leave them in the comments below. I would love to hear them.