Book & Baking Blog Entry 17

Well! Back in the USA. I already miss the Danish and German pastries. I HAVE to find a good baking book and try some real Danish pastries.

NOTE: Do NOT look up "Danish Pastries" on Amazon. It turns out that there is a pornographic movie with that title and you get some interesting hits...One of the movie posters was quite interesting...

So, while I plan on doing some baking in the near future and have ordered some almond meal so that I can try my hand at homemade marzipan I thought that I would do another post on a fantastic novel.

I found a Jane Haddam novel, Glass Houses, that I hadn't read yet. It is a Gregor Demarkian (with Bennis, of course.) I enjoyed the novel. Haddam spent a little more time on the Gregor/Bennis relationship than I cared for. It did interrupt the flow of the story, but overall a great read.

Rather than go into the finer points of Haddam's work I wanted to go back to a prior rant regarding publishers, kindle pricing, and electronic books. Haddam's publisher, Minotaur Books, sets the price for the books. This was fallout for amazon from Steve Jobs playing god again. But I digress. At least this publisher did not charge MORE for the e-book than for the paperback. However, I was appalled at the editing in the kindle edition. There were a fantastic number of words that were wrong words. Clearly they used a spell checker and not a human to detect errors. Thankfully I am able to understand words in context, but really, if I am supposed to pay as much if not more for an e-book PLEASE pay some humans to edit the copy. There were also a large number of extraneous symbols that were left in the text.

If you read my earlier post regarding this I go on at great length about understanding that there are a large number of people to be paid as part of the publishing of a book. I get it. People need jobs and have to be paid. BUT who wasn't doing his/her job in this case?

I believe that it goes back to the lack of respect that publishers have for the e-book format. If the hard copy went out with as many errors they would have to pull it and reprint. Maybe the American public is just to lazy to complain.

Well, I really enjoyed Haddam's effort but am disappointed that she, her publisher, her editor, and whoever else was involved would allow such a poor copy to be distributed.