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I have only downloaded two of the free ebooks so far, just to see how they were formatted. The epubs seemed to be a hybrid of several scanned images (book covers, copyright pages, illustrations, etc.) and the OCRed text from the PDF scans that Google originally did. The two books I briefly looked at had very few errors, but they definitely had not been proofread by a real human.
I have not downloaded any of the non-free books, so I don't know if they are any better as far as proofreading. If they have only been through the automated process, like the free books, then I won't be buying any of them at the prices I saw listed. Perhaps if the prices were much lower, I might tolerate a few more errors than usual (even some of the human proofread ebooks I've bought have errors).
The free books I looked at have very basic epub formatting. I would hope and expect the paid books to have better formatting. Again, if the paid books are just a combination of scanned pages and minimally formatted text with no human proofreading, I'll definitely pass. Perhaps some of you have spent your money can comment on this.
If Google really wants this to work, they are going to have to hire some biological units to proofread these books. No matter how fancy their OCR software is, it will never be as good as a real set of eyeballs when dealing with scanned images of old library books. They also should have someone do a better job with the epub formatting. If I'm going to spend real money on these books, I expect perfection, or nearly so.
Joe
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