This is interesting and I suspect will be a problem for many of us with the advent of e-readers and tablet/pad-like browsers...
Billy Collins, one of the country's most popular poets, had never seen his work in e-book form until he recently downloaded his latest collection on his Kindle.
He was unpleasantly surprised.
"I found that even in a very small font that if the original line is beyond a certain length, they will take the extra word and have it flush left on the screen, so that instead of a three-line stanza you actually have a four-line stanza. And that screws everything up," says Collins, a former U.S. poet laureate whose "Ballistics" came out in February.
Read more HERE
That sounds annoying. It also sounds like the formatting problem prose writers have been having in e-reader devices for years, messing up the paragraphs, typeface, etc. Just worse for a poet. It's a little surprising that publishers have been so lazy in the presentation of ebooks. They'd never look this way in print because it's people's jobs to lay them out.
ReplyDeleteThis is annoying as hell. I've a book coming out soon and I opted to allow it as an ebook in addition to print against my wife's advice - now I am truly not looking forward to it.
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