[bookman156]

A lot of publishers, particularly academic publishers, are now digitising their back catalogue for Kindle. Unfortunately they are doing this by scanning the original book and using OCR, often not even bothering to contact the original author to see whether they have an electronic copy that they could use or to proofread the ebook. So there are an awful lot of back-catalogue books being slung onto Kindle at high prices that have excellent hyperlinked footnotes but poorly proofread text, and perhaps not proofread at all, just littered with OCR errors. If the author finds out, they may complain and then have the work of correcting the publisher's efforts. I find it a scandal.

As for PDF, at least the original proofreading work done on the print book is not thrown away. PDF, for what it is, is an ideal format for representing digitally a print book. We all know this. As to whether a PDF constitutes an ebook is open to some discussion.