harry would fix it in a flash

I recently read The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith, a.k.a. JK Rowling, on my tablet's Kindle app. I'd been wanting to read a 'grown-up' book by JK for a while and I wasn't disappointed. However, there was some weird shit going on with the text formatting. Random words would appear in a much smaller font size, or be italicised for no apparent reason, or change font together. Weird. Weird but comforting. If the JK juggernaut can't get the formatting right then I don't see that I should lose sleep over mine. Of course, I suspect it was probably perfect at the point of sale and simply got mangled by my reader, but this is the problem with ebooks, they are at the mercy of reading devices of varying quality. We never have this problem with printed books, apart from the fact that they are read by optic nerves of varying quality. Customer, 'I want my money back, all the print in this book is out of focus.' 

Maybe one day there will be just the one ereader, or ereading application, and then all ebooks can be tailored, formatted, especially for it. Making the life of the self-publishing author so much less stressful. I guess then that all the obsolete ereaders would go the way of the Betamax cassette and the Eight Track tape. 

Anyway, I enjoyed The Cuckoo's Calling and look forward to reading the next book in the series, The Silkworm, but I'll read the paperback, probably.