As for buying public domain books, I think you either go free or get a marquee publisher version such as Penguin or Oxford World's Classics if it offers sufficient added value such as copious annotations or a modern translation. Paying a few bucks for PD is money wasted, in my opinion. Overall, the quality of free pd is much better than it was several years ago. As in:
Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
Buying any public domain book on Amazon is generally a bad idea. There are enormous numbers of editions, mostly from 'publishers' who have just repackaged whatever public domain copy of the text they could get their hands on - mostly the Project Gutenberg one.
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I quite like Amazon's in-house free public domain books. It's been a long time since I've run into any issues with them; they are good, clean copies. The hardest aspect can be finding them, given Amazon's search engine. Goodreads is a handy portal if you click on the Amazon edition there or sorting by price can work. I like the one-step aspect of it; one click and it'll download without the nuisance of downloading/sideloading.
Other sources for quality PD are Faded Page (Canadian public domain) and Girlebooks which isn't adding to its library but has a good basic library of books especially by women authors.