From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
This is the first to two related books I got for review purposes from Net Galley. They were by the same author, and were two small volumes in a series of short, illustrated children's books about interesting animal facts, which I thought might be fun. The problem was that they both were unreadable.
They came in three reading options. One was the Kindle version, which I knew would be a disaster, but which I sent to my Kindle app anyway, and got exactly what I'd expected. Actually I got less than I expected, because I expected at least to have some images that were sliced, diced, and julienned, which is what Kindle routinely does to anything that's not plain vanilla text. Instead I got completely blank screens! This isn't even the kindling I expected Amazon's crappy, limited, and destructive system to deliver.
Not losing heart, I progressed to one of the two other options Net Galley offered, which was an epub format. Usually there is no problem here, but in this case, it was almost as bad as the Kindle. At least I could see the images for the book's pages, but they were truncated. Normally, if a book runs to two pages, you half-expect it to be chopped up in electronic format, but the other half of the image was not on the next screen - it was gone completely! This meant that sometimes the image had been chopped, but usually it meant that the text had been curtailed and was unreadable because so much of it was missing.
Finally, there was a Net Galley reading app format, which normally is acceptable, but with which I've occasionally had problems. In this case, what I got was exactly the same result I got from the epub version: seriously bowdlerized images and text. Both of these books suffered the same problems. I honestly do not know how a publisher can distribute a book in this condition. Did no one think to check?! I imagine these books were designed from the ground up as print books, but we reviewers still need them to be legible in the electronic version!
Normally I like to positively review children's books if they have any redeeming features at all, but this one had zero. Consequently I have no choice but to declare this book warty to the max!
