Thread: Dangerously e-books: How do I know if my ebooks have been altered?
View Single Post
Old 07-20-2014, 07:10 PM   #386
Rev. Bob
Wizard
Rev. Bob ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Rev. Bob ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Rev. Bob ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Rev. Bob ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Rev. Bob ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Rev. Bob ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Rev. Bob ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Rev. Bob ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Rev. Bob ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Rev. Bob ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Rev. Bob ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Rev. Bob's Avatar
 
Posts: 1,760
Karma: 9918418
Join Date: Feb 2013
Location: Here on the perimeter, there are no stars
Device: Kobo H2O, iPad mini 3, Kindle Touch
Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz View Post
And it seems you agree with her, too -- the overlap where you both seem to reject the MR library as untrustworthy, and Catlady at least thinks there should be some form of objective "truth" to establish whether a person can upload or not.
I don't think it's unfair to consider the MR library "untrustworthy" on the question of textual fidelity, for the very reason that nobody's systematically checking the uploaders' work. That does boil down to "trust the uploaders," and historically that's not a very good way to establish credibility.

Notice that nowhere in that paragraph did I accuse anyone of malice. The fact is that humans are unreliable and sometimes get things wrong by accident, in addition to there being some people who change things deliberately. Motive isn't a factor in establishing trust, except to the extent that evidence of untrustworthy behavior actively destroys trust. The same goes for the amount of time spent; forgers often spend many hours getting something just right.

It seems that the MR library, in its current form, is a mass of contributed ebooks that have not been checked by anyone other than the original poster. That makes the library untrustworthy, like it or not. Rather than blaming the person who called attention to the problem, or those who agree that this is a problem, shouldn't the focus be on the problem itself and how to remedy it?
Rev. Bob is offline