Quote:
Originally Posted by Polyglot27
After reading jswinden's thread I realised that I have to say something about the present quality of many eBooks.
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=46221
A lot of MR members have toiled to format and upload works from Project Gutenberg and I am deeply thankful to them. However, it seems that the PG texts often have OCR errors that have not been caught by spell checkers for the reason that they are real words though the wrong ones. Like reading "done" for "clone".
Now, at least these books are free and one cannot complain too much about them. |
If you look at the books at PG, you will find a major jump upwards in quality for books produced since Distributed Proofreaders got going. Earlier books (which sadly includes many of the most-used classics) tend to have quite a few errors. Books that have been through DP have between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude fewer typos. There's a study out there somewhere that quantifies this, but I've lost the link.
What DP does is to crowdsource the proofreading, with multiple checks of each page and a reconciliation mechanism.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Polyglot27
But when publishers are selling digital versions of their books for real money, often at similar prices to the paper versions, and letting the OCR processed texts go through without a proper check by a real proof reader like for books printed on paper, I begin to wonder.
[SNIP] Is this acceptable?
|
My personal take is that it is not acceptable. But most publishers treat eBooks produced from old texts as the poor cousin of their main line of print books... which makes sense when you consider the current differences in sales. It's hard to justify major expenditure on something that generates 1% of revenue (if even that). That's a short-term view, of course, and may tend to perpetuate the low sales.
More forward-thinking publishers at least
attempt to bring us clean copy. Some even accept typo-notices (and eventually do something about them). This group includes Baen Books/Webscriptions, and may or may not include other publishers.
Xenophon
P.S. Fair disclosure: My sister has been one of the people "running" DP for a number of years (inasmuch as anyone could be said to 'run' a crowd-sourced volunteer organization like that), so I'm not an entirely disinterested observer.