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I’ve just finished reading ‘Sleep With Me’ by Joanna Briscoe, and felt driven to write one of my rare reviews and post it on Amazon. Joanna Briscoe is a compelling writer, who has won some prestigious awards, and I enjoyed the book enough to order her subsequent novel, ‘You’.

However: I read the Kindle edition. I paid over £5.00 for this – more than I would pay for a best-seller from my local supermarket – and I couldn’t help wondering whether Kindle readers are somehow regarded as second class consumers. Whatever happened to the proof-reading? I’m not a pedant, and I don’t spend my reading time looking for missed apostrophes. But what I’m talking about here are serious in-your-face typos – for instance, on one occasion the name ‘Richard’ was spelled something like ‘Ekxchard’, an error that any routine spell-check would have exposed. These typos became more prevalent towards the end of the book, suggesting that the proof-reader was on the point of falling asleep.

All this was additional to the many bizarre line and paragraph breaks that seem to be an unfortunate feature of E-books, and are probably more to do with process than author.

The typos and formatting issues were a distraction, and marred what was otherwise a readable (if slightly implausible) book.

Unrelated to this particular book, but on the subject of Kindle-reading – something else I find distracting are the highlights made by other readers. For instance, if somebody thinks ‘The sky was blue’ is a deep and meaningful comment, and decides to highlight it, then the highlight appears as a dotted line on everybody else’s download of the book. Some books I have on my Kindle are annoyingly spattered throughout with other people’s highlights.

When I was in my twenties, I had a habit – developed during my years as a literature student – of underlining paragraphs in my own paperbacks that seemed particularly significant or life-improving. In some books, almost 25% of the text was highlighted. Re-reading these books in later decades I was amazed (and sometimes embarrassed) by what I’d previously found highlight-worthy. But at least I didn’t share my moments of insight and discovery with all those people who already knew a blue sky when they saw one.

I love having a Kindle. I love the power it gives me to access a number of books when I’m away from home, and I love being able to download a book instantaneously rather than wait for the post to deliver it. I think it just needs a bit of refinement.

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