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A review by books_are_nice_and_enjoyable
100 Cases in Dermatology by Rachael Morris-Jones, Ann-Marie Powell, Emma Benton
2.75
The content itself is decent and covers a wide range of diseases and skin signs/manifestations, everything from some relatively harmless and self-limiting conditions to some cases of Very Bad News (...these do exist in the context of dermatology too! It almost felt like the authors wanted to remind you of this at the end of the book, by including that awful erythema gyratum repens case at that point).
But although the content was decent, some aspects of the reading experience was not. The Kindle version was infuriating to deal with, with two particular problems springing to mind:
1) This book could not actually be read on my Kindle device, as the device refused to open the file due to some error/compatibility issue, so I had to read it on my laptop instead.
2) The text is awful to work with if you like me are used to making highlights in the text. This is a medical textbook, what do you expect? Some words in the text I was physically unable to select with either the mouse or keyboard inputs (meaning if I wanted to highlight that specific word, well, good luck, not gonna happen); if you tried to do it anyway the application would 'jump' to the next or previous line and there was no way to only mark the word in question. Similarly there were problems with highlighting entire lines/sections where, when trying to highlight a passage it might take 5 times as long as usual because it would be very difficult to make sure the highlight did not include irrelevant words which would 'join the selection segment' due to poorly supported text interactions in general.
Presumably the problems related to point 2 were the result of a semi-failed e-book conversion of a physical copy, the user experience at least gave this impression. You could interact with (most of) the text, but they didn't make it easy for you, and that made the reading experience much worse than it could have been, which was really a shame as most of the book was actually decent enough.
But although the content was decent, some aspects of the reading experience was not. The Kindle version was infuriating to deal with, with two particular problems springing to mind:
1) This book could not actually be read on my Kindle device, as the device refused to open the file due to some error/compatibility issue, so I had to read it on my laptop instead.
2) The text is awful to work with if you like me are used to making highlights in the text. This is a medical textbook, what do you expect? Some words in the text I was physically unable to select with either the mouse or keyboard inputs (meaning if I wanted to highlight that specific word, well, good luck, not gonna happen); if you tried to do it anyway the application would 'jump' to the next or previous line and there was no way to only mark the word in question. Similarly there were problems with highlighting entire lines/sections where, when trying to highlight a passage it might take 5 times as long as usual because it would be very difficult to make sure the highlight did not include irrelevant words which would 'join the selection segment' due to poorly supported text interactions in general.
Presumably the problems related to point 2 were the result of a semi-failed e-book conversion of a physical copy, the user experience at least gave this impression. You could interact with (most of) the text, but they didn't make it easy for you, and that made the reading experience much worse than it could have been, which was really a shame as most of the book was actually decent enough.