[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by sun surfer

Thanks barryem and dordale. I've used gutenberg before but not had much luck with good ebook quality. The texts may be good (and that's a great thing!) but the ones I've tried were sort of plops of text with no formatting, links, etc. It's been years though since my last try with gutenberg. As for the MR library, I did mention it in my post above. It's a great resource that I've used a lot but the quality can vary widely depending on uploader. Neither gutenberg ebooks nor MR ebooks work with the Kindle features I like.



Thanks, AnemicOak. It's a shame the higher end versions of classics don't all have the ebook editions, but I can't imagine the cost of transferring it to ebook wouldn't be made up eventually in sales since after transfer there's basically no cost for them.

I'll give the advanced Kindle search a try; I didn't know about it. As for checking the publishers' websites directly, that seems like it could be onerous too when I don't have a particular publisher in mind on a book, but it's an idea.

I should've mentioned this in the first post but what I've been doing off and on is trying to search the Kindle store with a title plus the name of a publisher, for example 'wuthering heights penguin' and then switching it out with each I can think of, e.g. 'wuthering heights vintage', 'wuthering heights random', 'wuthering heights oxford', etc. It's tedious though and I feel like perhaps I might miss some nice edition from a publisher I forgot so I may end up doing that as well as going through the entire list of Kindle books for a title.

The only other trick I have is sorting by price highest to lowest since most 'higher end' versions aren't 99 cents but this is imperfect since some are, so again I may end up going through the entire list this way as well. I call these tricks but neither really works all that well to make it easier to find the nicer editions hence this thread looking for some better ways.

First they have to buy the book, then they have to buy a scanner, then an OCR reader, then they have to take at least 2 hours to scan the book, then run it through the OCR, and then take about 30 hours to proofread and correct before even uploading.

Not to mention making sure any forward, preface and notes are also in public domain.

So while it may not "cost" much after the initial equipment and software purchases, it is still very time consuming. And with so many free classics, it would be very hard to make any money.