Books app: how to report egregious typos and other formatting problems?

The problem I have is with specific books, not with the app itself. For example, The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson, published by WW Norton, has random page breaks throughout the book: text often stops halfway down the page and picks up again on the next page.


In this case I would normally start with Norton, but they have no way to open a support ticket unless you’re affiliated with a school — even though, as here, they publish many books of general interest.


There are are other text formatting problems I’ve had, such as incorrect indentations, egregious typos, and other issues. So while I have an issue with this particular book, I have the larger issue of how to report problems like this, and to whom?

iPad Air 2 Wi-Fi

Posted on Jan 24, 2019 6:03 PM

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3 replies

Feb 4, 2019 6:44 AM in response to TadDavis

For what it’s worth, I contacted Norton using the URL King_Penguin provided. Their response was:


”Thank you for your inquiry. I checked with our Ebook department and we will not be updating this ebook.”


i don’t think this is unique to Norton. Despite the popularity of ebooks, my impression is that most publishers consider ebooks a useless appendage. Texts are published without proofing, and formatting problems abound — especially with poetry and plays. Maps are often included at such a low resolution that they are unusable. Nobody seems to care about how crappy their products are, and nobody but nobody seems to have read anything about responsive design (taking screen size into consideration when formatting a text for display).


This is also not unique to Apple Books. I’ve seen issues like this with Kindle, Nook, and Scribd texts.


To be fair to Norton, they have worked with me on other etext issues, in particular access to the online edition of the Norton Shakespeare. I was surprised at their lack of interest in this.


Apple Books should have a button called “report formatting or content problems” and have an advocate who can work with publishers to address this.

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Books app: how to report egregious typos and other formatting problems?

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