Terrible Kindle Edition of a Beautiful Book
342873
The book itself gets a 5 for content, but when there are typos on almost every other screen it gets maddening.  Amazon gets a 1 for presentation, averaging this edition at 3.  If DaVinci did a portrait in crayon, although still a DaVinci, it is a crayon portait.  This is the crayon edition of a masterpiece.
524158
This is a great book and I was delighted to see a Kindle edition of it. However I found the Kindle edition defective shortly after purchasing it. There are serious typographical errors in the equations throughout the book, making it unreadable. The errors are not just minor formatting issues but severe ones such as mistyped letters, missing symbols and signs, which completely altered the meanings of the equations, making them incomprehensible. It is like the whole book was converted from the print edition using OCR without error checking. I was suprised the Kindle edition was put on market with such poor quality. I have returned the book for refund.
3011864
Having read the story years ago in paperback, I was excited to find it available for my new Kindle at a very reasonable price. Unfortunately, it appears you get what you pay for.

There are numerous errors in the translation of this book into its electronic (Kindle) edition. From the pointless links to the TOC at the end of each chapter, the insertion of strange characters in words, extraneous and unbalanced parentheses, to the bizarre substitution of the word "me" for the word "the" randomly throughout the book, the flow of the original printed version is greatly impaired. It's also somehow crippled in a way that prevents the enabling of full justification, so if you prefer that mode for reading, forget about it with this edition.

This must have been one of Amazon's early efforts, and I cannot see how it could have possibly been proofread in its electronic form. I hope this sort of sloppiness in transcription is rare at Amazon.

This is one case where buying the paperback version is the smarter move.

EDIT: I should have done this a couple of years ago . . . Just a note to let potential purchasers know that the publisher (or Amazon) has corrected most of the errors found in the original Kindle release. So buy it :)
3141438
The kindle edition of this seminal text is horrible. You can't navigate the table of contents which is a very basic but crucial flaw. Either pay up for the paper version or wait until they get this fixed - this is absolutely atrocious.
376148
I enjoyed re-reading this story but I was very disappointed at the quality of the Kindle edition.  There were many contextual typos (eg tack instead of tact -- made no sense in sentence) and I found it very distracting, especially having paid top $$ for the Kindle edition.  It needs to get cleaned up.

Also what's with putting the title page and associated publishing information at the END of the book? I know this isn't restricted just to this book but I would prefer 'normal' book format please.
2878566
Obviously my review is as much about the Kindle edition of this book as it is about the book itself.  I found the novel poetic, beautiful, deep, and thought provoking.  I am not a fan of magical realism, but this is an enjoyable read, and having traveled extensively, I can identify with descriptions that touch upon the less-than-concrete impressions that are left by each new place seen or experienced.

That said, the Kindle edition is an embarassment.  The publisher rushed a part-time intern into a room with a scanner and an OCR program and made sure they clocked out on time.  Maybe they should have thought about proof reading?  Italicized words appear randomly throughhout the text, obviously not intentionally.  Perhaps that's supposed to be a tribute to the author's first name?  But the words that are simply mis-recognized by the OCR software are the worst: "faces" becomes "feces" tipping us off to the standard of quality the publisher had in mind for this edition.  Come on you cheap bastards, just hire someone to proofread it before you throw it out there as a Kindle edition.
1779738
I Purchased the Kindle Edition of this book and am midway through the reading. I am VERY dissatisfied with the edition. The Kindle Edition is not an electronic version of the original book. It is an INCOMPLETE and FLAWED version:

1) Missing Illustrations. This is the most serious problem. Had I known the Kindle Edition does not bring the book's original illustrations, I would have never purchased it. At location 2490, the book says "Sometimes the tree lookes like the tree above. But other times they looked like the tree on next page". There are no ilustrations of trees to be seen in the Kindle Edition. At least I missed these 2 illustration if not more.

2) Punctuation Mistakes. This problem is annoying. At several points in the text (so far more than 10), there are dots where there should't be, missing commas, and some loose characters. Very bad editing, if there was ever some editing for this edition. I never saw so many editing mistakes in a print book.

3) Reference Mistakes. At location 2325, the book stil refers to pages "..something like the tree shown on page 124". Alas, there are no pages in the Kindle Editions, but locations.

This is my first book purchase for the Kindle DX, and am seriously dissapointed. It seems that in the hurry to publish Kindle titles, and perhaps the urge to keep book sizes small to minimize wireless delivery costs, the Kindle editions are very poor. For the less than dollar difference between the Kindle Edition and the paperback, it seems that it still makes better sense to get the paperback, at least in books with illustrations.

On the positive side for Amazon, I wrote to customer service and got a refund in less than 4 hours (am still surprised with the speed they answered!) I will go for the print version.

Oh, and the book is marvelous so far, very interesting and superbly written!
2967084
This if a fun summer read, just the thing to take on the beach and enjoy on a lazy afternoon.

The Kindle edition however is dreadful.  I imagine the print edition has obvious breaks in the text when the point of view changes; either through triple spacing of the paragraph at the shift or by using ornamental bullets/leafs/printer's marks to indicate the shift.  The Kindle edition has nothing to indicate changes in the points of view; the paragraphs just all run together and makes for a jarring read.  Suggest Amazon revise the Kindle edition to make it easier to read.
3858914
Unfortunately, Amazon offers no way for a reader to warn about a terrible Kindle edition other than providing a one-star review of the book. That's what this is: a caveat to Kindle edition readers that the digitization of this title is miserable. There are uncorrected OCR errors, and footnotes that appeared as asterisked or daggered notes in the print edition are just crammed into the running text, interrupting the flow (often within a sentencesee the attached photo for an example). At the time I purchased it, the Kindle version was significantly discounted, but you're getting what you're paying for. Borrowing a copy from the library would be a better option if you don't want to buy a physical book.
823035
I own the paperback version of this book which I love and thought I would buy the Kindle version so I could carry it around with me more easily.  I was anxious to use it but when I did, Ifound the kindle version next to worthless.  Specifically, it is very hard to search with for a verb without knowing the exact location (not page.) Secondly, the actual conjugation pages are almost impossible to read.  The text is tiny and the size cannot be increased. My guess is that those pages are images and not text so the ability for the kindle to make them legible seems to be impossible, making this book, as a reference and study guide, unusable. I cannot find enough negative adjectives to describe my feelings.  I am going to ask Amazon for a refund and would advise the authors (editors or programmers) to correct the kindle version to make it usable.
2472525
I am delighted to discover Caroline Graham. She's a wonderful writer -- her characters become real the instant you meet them. Don't know how she does it. And Sergeant Troy is hilarious.

However -- shame on Amazon and Kindle for publishing this poorly-scanned and never-proofread Kindle edition. There are hundreds of clear scanning errors -- "die" for "the", "Arn" for "Ann", and many many more -- including dropped punctuation all over the place. It's extremely distracting to read a book that's this badly presented, and I'm hesitant to try any other of Caroline Graham's Kindle titles for fear they'll be the same.

This edition should be fixed -- and not by just running a spell-check operation on it, it needs a human being to see the errors -- or our money should be refunded. Really, it's outrageous -- no paper book could ever be published like this.
3515743
Very disappointed.  The book is a great work, but there are so many unreadable words in the Kindle e-book edition that after a few pages of frustration, you finally give up trying.  This product should either be taken off the availablity or corrected for errors so it becomes readable.
1074943
The content of this book might be good, other reviewers say that it is. Unfortunately, I purchased the kindle edition of this book.  It is obviously that the kindle edition of the book was just scanned and uploaded for sale, without any editing. It's LITERALLY illegible.  I have uploaded a page to show how impossible this book is to read.  I purchased this book for a class, and didn't sit down to read it until the chapters were assigned in class, so I didn't discover these formatting issues until it was too late to get a refund. But the kindle version of the book is literally CANNOT be read, I tried it on my computer, my kindle fire, and my iphone.  This book is garbage. But the paper version.

And as for you Dalya Massachi, shame on you and your publishers for selling a product that looks like this, You should be ashamed of yourself. ALSO you have an entire section on editing, yet you couldn't even be bothered to edit your own book.  For SHAME.  FOR SHAME.

I am genuinely offended by how horribly this book is formatted. I have never seen anything like it before.
1477215
If I were only rating Pat Conroy's wonderful book, I'd be giving it five stars instead of two. However, the Kindle edition, which I purchased 26 December 2008, is riddled with ridiculous typographical errors which make reading a chore. You'll honestly do a double-take on every page, sometimes having to pull yourself out of the story to decide what word ought to be there instead of its mistaken substitute.

"Off" is very frequently rendered "of." "Says" is very often rendered "sas." In at least one place, "the" is rendered as "die." At locations 2884-98, we read, "He is an American movie star in a America (sic) movie..." These are just a few examples; I could go on all night.

Please do yourself a favor and hold off buying the Kindle edition of "The Water is Wide" until these problems are corrected and you can savor every word of Pat Conroy's inspiring, infuriating, life-affirming story.
1253649
Really really disappointed in the Kindle version of this book. It is NOTHING like the hard copy. Images of poses are tiny, and take what was a really good book and make it so much less approachable and user friendly. In the hard copy version, pictures are large, full page, and contain detailed information in the form of bullet points with details about the correct way to do the poses. In the Kindle version you cannot see the bullets, and the images are thumbnail small and not nearly as helpful as in the hard copy. Very very disappointed with this purchase.
4472389
The kindle version formatting makes it almost impossible to read!  I love the hard bound edition, but would not recommend the kindle version to anyone!
1659419
Do not buy the Kindle version; none of the charts, tables or exhibits render properly (at least not on my iPad Kindle app), and that is half the value of the book. Reading about the project management tools and templates they used, without being able to see the examples of those included in the appendix, makes the book worthless in Kindle form. How could this have been converted so improperly?!? I mean come on, it's a 2012 book, it's not like they were trying to convert some old historical text that only existed in print form!