Quote:
Originally Posted by bgalbrecht
Barry, as another volunteer proofer & content provider at Distributed Proofreaders, I'd like to point out that while most of the books at Project Gutenberg are scanned and proofed and formatted by several individuals, PG also accepts books from other volunteers. While DP tries to be faithful to specific original printings of books, this is not true of all PG works, and sometimes the PG book is even an almagam of different editions. The early works were also text only and lost all of the typographic features, like bold or italics for emphasis. It is my impression that the PG mobi and epub editions may be autogenerated from the text or html editions.
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I wasn't aware that they took ebooks from other sources but still, I've read quite a lot of Gutenberg titles over the years and I've found their quality to be good. It might be that I've missed the ones the PG proofers didn't do. I don't know.
As for text only, that's how ebooks began. I'd been reading ebooks for a lot of years before I ever saw my first formatted ebook. I can't give you dates but I'll bet they were all text only for the first 10 years and I won't be surprised if it turns out to be 20 years.
I can't even estimate how many text only ebooks I've read. I'm not sure I've read as many formatted ones, in fact.
While I'm very happy that they're formatted these days I don't have any problem with plain text. I've only seen that hurt a book once and even then it didn't matter much. What I'm thinking of is Alfred Bester's "The Stars My Destination", in which Bester used very odd formatting to give a sense of being lost. It was effective and it wasn't there in the all text version I read but that didn't stop it from being a great read.
There may have been other times something was lost by not having the kind of formatting we're used to in books but either I wasn't aware of them or I've forgotten them.
Barry