Quote:
Originally Posted by mikij
However, the georestriction and the fact that many of the contemporary authors are not available in form of eBooks MIGHT push some towards the pirates. However, I suppose the pirates don't do a professional proofreading (if at all) and they cannot be interesting to readers.
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It depends upon the pirates. Some are just doing scan and OCR on a paper copy, and issuing the result. The quality will vary depending upon the source, the scanner, and the OCR.
Some actually
do edit and proofread. There are immaculate ebook versions of all the Harry Potter books on the darknet, for example, which were obviously labors of love for those who produced them. There were no ebook editions (because J. K. Rowling refuses to license any), so they created them, but they loved the books and wanted to do it right.
Oddly, some of the worst ebook versions I've seen have been conversions of existing electronic files. In the early days of Project Gutenberg, people would scan and OCR public domain books, but editing and proofreading was at best inconsistent. Once Distributed Proofreaders got into operation and became the PG source, things got a
lot better, but early stuff from before DP was still up on PG. (Ask MR member HarryT about the fun he's had proofing the works of Charles Dickens against his print editions to produce his ebook versions, because the PG source material was so bad. At this point, I think Harry's releases may be the definitive ebook versions.)
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Dennis