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Old 02-12-2018, 14:57   #1
Anonymouse
RIP Tigger - 11 years?!
 
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Angry Discrepancies between e-books and printed versions

- not to put too fine a point on it, I'd like to know why there are any discrepancies!

To explain:

Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon is very firmly in my top ten of favourite novels, and as I now have an Amazon Fire (which didn't exist when the novel was first released, of course) I decided to get the e-book version.

(As well as the entire Honor Harrington series, plus Harry Potter, plus a number of others...)

An accepted literary practice is to denote a character's inner thoughts by using italics in order to distinguish said thoughts from the narrative, and Altered Carbon is no exception to this - I for one prefer this literary device. The central character, Takeshi Kovacs, frequently quotes from the writings of Quellcrist Falconer, who might best be described as a political activist poet/revolutionary, and the quotes are, quite properly, in italics - at least they are in the printed version.

So why the hell are there several sections of text in the e-book version which should be in italics, but are not?!

Call me a purist - meh, I've been called worse. Call me a nitpicker - okay, I'll answer to that too; long ago I wanted to be a scientist and I'd like to think I've retained most of the mindset necessary for that...such as a keen eye for detail. But in this digital day and age, I don't believe exactitude and perfect fidelity are too much to ask.

The original manuscript for Altered Carbon is, surely, in a digital format - so why is it so difficult, apparently, to deliver an exact reproduction thereof via the e-book? To see plain text where there should be italics may be a trivial niggle to most, but to me it's highly annoying - especially as I have effectively bought two copies of this and several other books (I don't begrudge the extra cost per se because the convenience of holding an entire library in your hand is worth it). I want to know why this happens at all.

Sidenote: this also happens in Woken Furies - but not, bizarrely, in Broken Angels, even though I bought all three as part of a collection.
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Last edited by Anonymouse; 02-12-2018 at 15:02.
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