I’ve noticed something annoying in my Kindle books. “em” dashes screwing up the page. I find a book with perfectly good formatting, but because the Kindle reads the em dash as part of the word, if the word is lengthy, it will jump to a new line. It can make for extra short lines within a paragraph and odd clunky chunks of white space.
This is a really minor annoyance, and I can’t fault the ebook formatters. They’re using standard style. The computer is doing what it’s asked to do. I’ve decided what’s needed is a less than standard style. From now I’m adding a space before and after the em dash.
Instead of “I think he’s the best–and I use that loosely–so will let him live.”
I will do this “I think he’s the best – and I use that loosely – so will let him live.”
The only time I won’t put in the extra space will be at the end of a sentence. It would look bad to separate the em dash from the last word and having it end up on a line all its own.
By the way, everyone knows, or accepts, two dashes as equivalent to an em dash. But using the actual symbol looks much nicer in an ebook. So when formatting, do a search and replace.
Read: The Black Echo, by Michael Connelly, copyright 1992. Finally! Found the very first appearance of Harry Bosch. A Kindle edition (and thanks, Grand Central Publishing for making it look good). Detective Harry Bosch sets out to solve a murder and ends up in the middle of a very nasty conspiracy.
It's the age of the New Writer. Own It, Share It, Take Responsibility For It. It's all about connecting with readers. 
This bugs me as well about Kindle formatting. Technically, there should be a hair space or thin space between the em dash and the preceding and following words — but you can’t do that on the Kindle. I actually put a hard non-breaking space between the em dash and the preceding word, but not between the em dash and the following word. That way, the em dash never shows up at the beginning of a line, which is something I particularly hate.
Basically, I’m looking forward to the 2.0 version of Kindle formatting, which will allow for proper typesetting.
Ah ha! I’m glad I’m not the only one this bugs. Good tip about not putting the em dash at the front of the line. Thanks!
The entire handling of “em” as a measure is completely broken on the Kindle and I really, really hope Amazon is going to fix that soon. Actually, they should have fixed that 2 years ago.
I’m not so good at changing systems, Guido. My nature is more subversive, always looking for ways to go around the problems. Heh. Your series on “Take pride in your your ebook formatting” series is wonderful, by the way. Thank you very much for that.
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