Sitepoint Kindle Books Formatting (bad)

[sergein]

I am very annoyed with kindle books by Sitepoint that I purchased via amazon. The content is as expected but the entire text is BOLD. Another peculiar point is that when I manipulate the pages or sometimes click internal links the font inside the current chapter turns back to normal. Problem is that whenever I start reading new chapter the font is back to bold.

Currently I have 3 books by Sitepoint:

Simply SQL
PHP Anthology
PHP&MySQL: Novice to ninja

ALL of them are messed up in this way.

Seriously, I think I would get better results by downloading a PDF torrent and converting it to ePub. Why do I have to pay for books where I have to worry about formatting more than content?

NB! This formatting is on all my devices: iPad 3, iPhone 4s and MacBook Pro.

Below is the screenshots of one of hundreds badly formatted pages.

image.jpg

[guido2004]

Hi sergein, I'm sorry to hear you're having trouble with the Sitepoint kindle books.
I think the best thing you can do is writing a mail to books@sitepoint.com explaining your problem. Usually I would tag our admin and she would make sure your problem was forwarded to the correct persons within Sitepoint, but she's on holiday and won't be back for a couple of weeks.

[Mikl]

Sergein,

I can't speak on behalf of Sitepoint, but I feel sure that, if there is a problem with these books, they will do their best to fix it.

But I doubt if this affects all Sitepoint books on the Kindle. I own a couple of the books (not the same titles as yours), and they look fine, both on my Kindle and in the Kindle for PC app. I obtained these books directly from Sitepoint, not from Amazon.

I'd also suggest that you contact Kindle Support about this (note: Kindle support, not Amazon support). It's just possible that the problem is specific to their publishing platform, rather than to Sitepoint books as a whole, in which case they will offer you a refund. I know that's not what you want, but at least it will alert them to the problem, and encourage them to fix it for the benefit of others.

Mike

[sergein]

Thanks for the reply. I don't need a refund. I like the books and I know that Sitepoint is an authority site that stands for quality. I just need my books to get fixed asap (I like seeing bold highlights where the author wanted them to be and not everywhere because of some glitch) and I need to make sure that this problem doesn't come up the next time I buy a Sitepoint book on Amazon (I definitely plan to do so in the future).

[sergein]

Hi sergein, I'm sorry to hear you're having trouble with the Sitepoint kindle books.
I think the best thing you can do is writing a mail to books@sitepoint.com explaining your problem. Usually I would tag our admin and she would make sure your problem was forwarded to the correct persons within Sitepoint, but she's on holiday and won't be back for a couple of weeks.

I have written to that email address. Hope to get some feedback soon. Thanks for the suggestion.

[Stomme poes]

If/when you get a reply, we'd be interested in knowing what's going on (you're likely not the only one with this Bold problem).

[sergein]

I've got a very nice email from Sitepoint. They said that this issue is caused by Amazon. Sitepoint don't have direct control over how Amazon format the ebooks they sell. Sitepoint were kind enough to send me their iBook and Kindle versions of the books. These were formatted properly. I have reuploaded the books via Send to Kindle and now I can read them on my iPad and iPhone sharing the highlights.

My thanks goes to Sitepoint (great customer service guys!) and specifically to Tim from their support team

To sum it all up. Next time I'll make sure I buy the Sitepoint books directly from them. Screw Amazon with their reckless formatting.

[spikeZ]

Thanks for the update Sergein, glad you are happy and got it sorted