[Roger Slater]

Bill, I have Calibre, but it never occurred to me that I might be able to use it to fix copyrighted e-books with DRM. Is that what you're saying? Or does it only work on public domain, free stuff?

This only goes to show what kind of a scandal it is that the publishers can't get it right to begin with. If amateurs can simply fix the formatting errors with Kindle, I don't know why the publishers can't manage the same trick, or why they don't vet the product before they release it. They would never release a traditional book with mangled stanza breaks, so what makes them think they can omit to vet the e-books as well?

By the way, for my own personal documents and poetry, I have found that I get the best results by using simple HTML. Use a break code for every line, and a double break for stanzas. Other simple codes, like bold, also translate just fine.

Also, as some of you might not know, with Kindle you can email any word, PDF or HTML document to your own Kindle email account, and within a minute or two the document will magically appear on your Kindle. It's a wonderful feature, since it lets you store, along with all your books, all of your manuscripts and personal papers.

A photographic rendering isn't the best solution, Chris, since it gives you almost no control over the text size. If you use the Kindle format, you can adjust the font size to suit your own taste and eyesight. If you do this for a photo/pdf file, the screen size is ignored and text can flow off the side of the screen unless you shrink the whole page to make it fit.

PS-- I took a trial subscription to the New Yorker on my Kindle, and the poems were laid out perfectly. So it can be done if people care to do it right. By contrast, almost all other poetry I have downloaded has been botched in terms of lay-out, whether it is free or paid for.