Hall of Shame

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

Lazy, but understandable. PDF will be what they send to the printers. But if they are doing it for that reason, it wouldn't explain why the ebooks have a lot more spelling mistakes in them than the print versions.

Those are OCR and/or spell checking mistakes. One thing I do see a lot of sometimes is the spurious - in a word where it doesn't belong. This is due to either OCR or PDF conversion. And it does break the flow of the book.

There is a digital file out there (mostly in Word) that could be used to make the eBook versions. But that won't happen as the publishers are too shortsighted to see that have no clue what to do.

[alecE]

And herewith another contender for the Hall Of shame 'Grot Books' award:
Penguin History of Modern China - a sample paragraph is reproduced here with the line breaks as they appear on my 505 liseuse:

With their eyes on the territory's gold, iron ore
and coal deposits, and its strategic position on the
Soviet border, the Japanese encouraged an auto
nomist movement in Mongo liatorebel against
Chine serule.....

Yes, that is how it appeared; no hyphens, strange separations and elisions.

In the first 287 or 797 pages, I'm encountering mangled paragraphs such as the above roughly every 10 pages.

I've emailed Penguin about this. Will post any response I get.
(I have offered to strip the drm off, correct the text and send it back if they'll pay for my time. tongue in cheek, moi?)

[mr ploppy]

Mostly I've been reading Smashwords books, so it's probably not really fair to publicise how many mistakes are in them. I've had good responses to lists of mistakes I've sent to some of the writers, and got a few free books from them (including one real book), but mostly I'm just ignored.

[mikij]

Originally Posted by alecE

And herewith another contender for the Hall Of shame 'Grot Books' award:
Penguin History of Modern China - a sample paragraph is reproduced here with the line breaks as they appear on my 505 liseuse:

With their eyes on the territory's gold, iron ore
and coal deposits, and its strategic position on the
Soviet border, the Japanese encouraged an auto
nomist movement in Mongo liatorebel against
Chine serule.....

Yes, that is how it appeared; no hyphens, strange separations and elisions.

In the first 287 or 797 pages, I'm encountering mangled paragraphs such as the above roughly every 10 pages.

I've emailed Penguin about this. Will post any response I get.
(I have offered to strip the drm off, correct the text and send it back if they'll pay for my time. tongue in cheek, moi?)

Maybe they thought it was a poetry! Just a joke...

If you offered to strip the DRM and fix the text, they could send you a police rather then a cheque. But maybe they care, nobody knows, but I doubt.

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by mikij

Maybe they thought it was a poetry! Just a joke...

If you offered to strip the DRM and fix the text, they could send you a police rather then a cheque. But maybe they care, nobody knows, but I doubt.

What makes you think they even open the emails?

See the next Penguin review below

Regards, Alex

[AlexBell]

The book is I, Claudius by Robert Graves from ePenguins

Although it does not have the frightful typos that occur in Interventions by Noam Chomsky which I reviewed earlier it has an even more irritating fault: text which is supposed to be indented (in blockquotes) starts at about 40% the width of the page from the left side of the screen.

The margins are a little narrower than in Interventions but are still too wide.

In my earlier post I mentioned that I wondered whether ePenguins was producing such shoddy ebooks deliberately so as to drive us back to print books. I think it's a draw between ePenguins and me: I'll never knowingly buy an ePenguin ebook again, but they haven't succeeded in forcing me back to print books and I doubt that I'll buy a Penguin print book either.

Regards, Alex

[alecE]

Originally Posted by AlexBell

What makes you think they even open the emails?

See the next Penguin review below

Regards, Alex

Current state of play:
Waterstones have responded with a "oops we're sorry, send further details";
Penguin (so far) have responded with a deafening silence.

[alecE]

Here's the response from Waterstones:
I apologise for the discrepancies you have received in the text content for your recent order ;3482305. I will be more than happy to forward your comments for this to be rectified or removed. Thank you for taking the time to inform our department as we appreciate the comments for quality purposes.

And here's the Penguin response:

That's right, I can't see it either :-)

[ryancolm]

Originally Posted by AlexBell

The book is I, Claudius by Robert Graves from ePenguins ... text which is supposed to be indented (in blockquotes) starts at about 40% the width of the page from the left side of the screen.

I also have this problem with I, Claudius. I gave a scathing review of it (the ebook, not the "real" book) on the Waterstone's website. "Kate" from Waterstone's said: "I'm sorry that you had problems with this eBook. We will feed your comments back to the publisher so that the issues can be resolved."

Which simply won't happen.

ePenguins are not trying to drive us back to print media. By releasing a shoddy product now, they are leaving the way open to release a "remastered" edition of the e-book, rather like the Beatles Remastered, and re-re-remastered and so on - not happy with selling us a CD once, we apparently have to buy it four or five times. It'll be the same with ebooks. I think I'll sign up to the Folio Society. Those editions, at least, are permanent.