[GeoffR]

Many of the ebooks I buy, mainly from the large publishing houses, have a significant number of spelling mistakes and/or formatting errors. Not enough to make the book unreadable, but enough to be annoying. Some of the books I wouldn't bother correcting. But others, especially those by my favourite authors which I expect to read again and again, I might.

(I'm currently reading Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay, UK ePub edition published by HarperCollins. It is missing half or more of the scene breaks. If it was a crap book I would just complain to the retailer and get my money back, but it is actually a great book, so I want to read it despite the formatting problems.)

Of course it would be illegal for me to share a corrected copy of the book, but would there be some way I could legally share the information needed for someone else to easily make the same corrections to their own copy of the ebook?

For example, if I used the unix diff program to make a patch file of changes between the original ebook and my own corrected version, would it be legal for me to distribute the diff file? Could I post it here on MobileRead?

If it was legal, do you think it would be worthwhile? Or would I be better just to write to the retailer/publisher/author with a list of corrections and hope they fix the original ebook?