Currently, over 180,000 books have been converted and made available on Amazon's Kindle reading device. The variety of available books is astonishing. So, unfortunately, is the variation in quality.

While you might expect that only minimal effort would be put into many of the public domain books, some of which may appear in a dozen or more editions in this format, and are often little more than Project Gutenberg text files with the boilerplate stripped and converted without any pretense of formatting, you tend to expect a little more from commercial publishers. If you paid only 99¢ for a book you might overlook formatting shortcomings; at $9.99 you expect a bit more.

You expect more, but that doesn't mean that you get it.

A number of shortcomings have appeared in the Kindle editions of several trade books we have read in the last few months. Most of these are the sort of error you simply don't expect in the product of a major publisher. Some of these include:

• An entire book without the first line of any paragraph indented. This isn't an easy accomplishment when the reader indents the first line by default.
• Whole or partial paragraphs indented for no obvious reason.
• Missing or unlinked footnotes.
• Table of Contents not linked to the text.

Most of these errors could have been easily avoided by simply taking a little extra time to properly format the source file before converting to Kindle format.

This is where Riverdale Publisher Services comes to the rescue. For a modest charge we will prepare a clean, correctly formatted Kindle .html source file of your books, with proper paragraphing, working tables of contents and footnotes, typographic quotes, italics where called for, and any required diacritical marks. Our standard price of $.005 per word* does not include editing, but if we find something spelled wrong during conversion we'll fix it anyway.

*Standard price is for conversion from an edited Microsoft Word .doc file. Word count is determined by pre-conversion statistics in the file. Conversion from InDesign .indd or PageMaker .pmd file is $.0075 per word, based on pre-conversion statistics. All files must be in PC format.