The Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe podcast series continues to entertain me. This week’s episode talks a lot about Nnedi Okorafor’s first adult novel, Who Fears Death, which I had already been planning to buy. The section that I found most interesting, however, was right at the end where the boys talk about ebooks.

The big row about ebook pricing appears to have mostly died down, but with the advent of the iPad the issue that is now being raised is how badly many ebooks are presented. Jonathan and Gary address that issue. The problem, as I understand it, is that way too many people are just throwing an existing PDF file at some automatic conversion software and pushing out the result without any further work. This is not good. It makes the ebooks cheap to produce, but it also makes them hard to read, and look shoddy. There will, in time, I am sure, be companies that put a lot of care and attention into ebooks. Some of them might be so good that people would be prepared to pay a lot of money for them.