Quote:
Originally Posted by Moejoe
Great news. And is it just me, or does the whole ebook and e-reading world seem to be accelerating at a rapid pace in recent months? Every day there seems to be news, and a lot of it quite good (apart from Amazon).
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It's not just you. Improved screens are driving a hardware resurgence, while publisher's fears and Amazon's activity are causing a bandwagon effect. (And whatever you feel about Amazon, they are a major driver of publishing activity thanks to their sizable influence right now.) Combined with a shaky economy and failing ecology forcing people to rethink how they do things, and the web providing people with new commerce avenues, and you have a "perfect storm" of influences that are accelerating e-book adoption.
I am not averse to entities providing the texts... just providing them in an "unfinished" manner, and simply expecting that someone else (like MR members and others) will pick up the slack and clean up everything. For one thing, it's lazy and presumptuous. For another, it is potentially placing such editing work in the hands of amateurs and vandals, with no direct way of confirming that said edits are done properly, and the potential for numerous "bad" versions of a text to be flying around out there even after edits are fixed. This is bad for the integrity of the work, and IMO a very negative aspect of this effort.
Though I am not one to invoke "Orwellian" concerns whenever something changes that I do not like, I think there's a legitimate reason to be concerned about the potential for numerous different versions of our document heritage to be floating about unvetted, leading to misinformation on a large scale, intended or not. Someone responsible (and impartial) should be in charge of cleaning these texts, and someone responsible (and impartial) should be supervising that effort diligently, for me to be satisfied.