Quote:
Originally Posted by EbookNovice
Alright, I'm going to get back to replying the others in this thread. Before I do that, I just noticed that on Amazon it's possible to get a preview of e-books. Does anyone know of a fast way for me to compare the preview version with my real version of the same book on my hard drive?
Thanks!
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If you're really concerned about whether the book has been altered, I suppose you could take the sample, convert it to text and do a text compare against the file you had. But which are you using as the standard of comparison? Are you verifying your copy against Amazon's sample, or are you verifying Amazon's sample against your file? The latter implies that you already trust your files, so why bother to check them? And the former implies that you trust Amazon, so if the accuracy of the books are important, buy from Amazon (Or B&N, Kobo, etc.).
If you're really concerned, buy the books in paper and scan them yourself. It's really not very likely that books you obtain from a legitimate source are going to contain malicious edits, it would probably be discovered fairly quickly. If enough people were really concerned, I suppose the Library of Congress would be used as a gold standard for comparison.