I picked this up because it looked interesting. A diver’s story of exploring his favourite wrecks around the world held a lot of promise, and the writing lived up to it. Unfortunately I couldn’t finish the book due to a major problem.

The formatting on Kindle for PC is a nightmare. It tries to condense a printed page onto the screen resulting in extremely small text (4 pixels high on the default setting). I had to resize the display before the standard left and right page turns would work and then only intermittently, and on first load you can only navigate by a footer bar which hides part of the already squished page. You will end up scrolling and the book cannot reflow text, or even resize it without resizing the whole page. By page 4 I was getting tired of having to scroll down to see the rest of the page and then waggle the mouse until the footer became visible, page turn, wait for the footer to vanish, and then scroll…

This is a fascinating read, with some gorgeous photographs, but trying to read it was killing my eyes. I would love to get a copy in paperback, and as far as I can tell there’s nothing wrong with the writing, grammar or spelling. It is just an example of why scanned PDFs don’t make good ebooks. Did not finish – even though I really wanted to.