Quote:
Originally Posted by elemenoP
I would pay a buck or two for good formatting and proofreading of a public domain book. The problem is, how do you know before buying, if the book has good formatting and has been proofread?
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Sampling aside, it might also help to get books from the same "line", if the re-packager makes a habit of adding proper formatting to the free texts as a value-add, like I've heard the MobileReference people who sell on Amazon do. It won't quite be a guarantee of quality, but probably the closest thing you'll get to one, provided the "publisher" is consistent.
As an example, B&N's Barnes and Noble Classics line is very good and mostly $1.99 each. They do these really nice annotated editions with lengthy bonus introductions and essays by university-type people. There was a major promotion over the summer where they gave away over 100 of them, and you can still get 12 free just for downloading and installing their
NookStudy app if you'd like to try them out.
However, they're not immune to the occasional typo. I saw "hght" instead of "light" once in their version of Frankenstein. But most of their Classics editions that I've read have only had 3-4 visible typos, max, and B&N do have an official thread on their discussion boards for people to tell them about e-book errors so they can fix stuff.
And the B&N Classics selection is limited to some 200 books that are basically the ones by famous/critically-adored authors with commercial/literary-course appeal, so if the book you're looking for is not one of them, you're out of luck. Though the companion B&N Essential Reading series expands the selection somewhat, but without the nifty extras (although every volume is supposed to have a specially written introduction by some relevant person).
But aside from that, I think they probably make the best-formatted versions of the classics that you can get by paying the lowest price, if you're not relying purely on the kindness of strangers who take the time to hand-format stuff for free.