I purchased a reprint copy of Crotchet Castle by Thomas Love Peacock some time back because it was one of those books that was on my to-read list for awhile. For those not familiar with reprint books, these are cheap, very bare-bones reprints of books that are out of print and, presumably, in the public domain, or perhaps so not in demand that the rights can be had for a song. I’ve seen these sort of books before, but never before actually read one. It’s not a pleasant experience.
First there are the covers. There’s this rumor that you can’t judge a book by its cover, but people do it all the time. My day job is pretty much based on the idea that you can judge a book by its cover. These reprint books tend to have the most boring covers imaginable. You would think these reprint publishers could simply find some halfway decent public domain artwork and slap that on the cover. While there are plenty of cover catastrophes out there as the Judge a Book by its Cover blog gleefully points out or as the recent flap over Justine Larbalestier’s book Liar has shown us, it seems that the least a reprint publisher could do is to make an attempt at creating a vaguely appealing cover.
The blahness, does not end there. It took me until the third chapter to realize that the strange beginning to each chapter was actually an epigraph. Because these weren’t italicized or set off in anyway from the rest of the chapter they just read as if they were the start of a perplexing paragraph. Similar lazy formatting in the book led to several points when the jarring “[Greek text]” would appear, just like that. I can’t even begin to read Greek text, but something tells me seeing it being printed there as opposed to this stand-in text would have helped the book to flow along just a bit smoother. I also kind of doubt that Mr. Peacock is to blame for the strange punctuation situations that periodically occurred leading to what appeared to be random emoticons in a nineteenth century novella.
All of this detracted from my overall reading experience and makes me think that this must be what reading an e-book is sort of like. I realize there are all sorts of improvements in the technology, but still I can’t help but feel that one must sacrifice certain standard book features when opting for a digital version of a book, and to me this takes too much away from the pleasant nature of the reading experience.
Are you an e-book reader? I am being stodgy and old-fashioned in thinking that good old fashioned books are still the superior medium?
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