Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthem
And some books (not a large publisher) like In The Beginning by Isaac Asimov which was digitized by e-reads is absolutely dreadful and the print version should be preferred when wishing to quote from it or use it as a source of any sort of information (even though I only have the ebook edition).
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Ah,
e-Reads, where scene breaks go to die.
Yeah, I've picked up a bunch of books from them, and while I'm grateful that they're steadily making seriously out-of-print backlist stuff I'm actually interested in available DRM-free and MultiFormat, their quality control is simply not up to their enthusiasm.
To be fair, most of the mistakes that I noticed in their books that I've read were very obvious and easily fixable (and relatively infrequent) scannos, and the all-too-common scene-break eating thing which is usually fairly obvious where there was meant to be a break and I can check against a paper copy if the used bookshop's got any.
Easier to live with than the surprisingly annoying dropped punctuation, superfluous hyphens, and pseudo-l33t5p34|< that arises from various OCR errors sprinkled throughout the current major-publisher freebie I'm reading.
Still, one of these days I'm going to take the time to track down and fix the errors in my eReads editions and send the corrections to them in the hopes that they do something about it for the benefit of their other customers. Because they don't price their books cheaply unless you catch them during a deep discount Fictionwise coupon sale.
I think the general rule for smaller houses is all-or-nothing. Either they have a process in place to do a good job overall, like Kensington and Harlequin (I've only seen their freebies, but the ones I looked at are very nicely put together), or they do a lazy-seeming job across the board (I like Baen, but their stuff seems to be auto-generated using Calibre and the typographical/layout niceties can be a bit lacking).
But whatever you get, there's some form of consistency.
Big houses, of course, seem to farm out to various producers, so there's more of a reader roulette thing going on.