Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoffC
of course it's not a new problem is it?
i'm currently reading in paper form "Confessor" the last in the Sword of Truth series and that had numerous mistakes in spelling....
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But I think we can agree that less attention is paid to e-book editions. I've been think about this, and I think there are three problems:
- Especially for older books, publishers do not always have on hand digital copies of the final, fully edited text used to typeset the print edition. They use OCR to extract the final text from the print edition, but do not allocate the budget for fully proofing that text and/or do not have sufficient experience proofing OCRed text. (If you've ever contributed to the Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders program, you know that many of the errors OCR systems make are quite different from human typographical errors.)
- Not all publishers have or are willing to invest in having the knowledge necessary to create electronic editions of texts in-house. In order to produce electronic editions anyway, these publishers will contract out e-book production to a third party. Some of these companies are quite good -- most of the Overdrive-produced book I've purchased have been very well-formatted -- and others not, but either way the additional distance means that publishers do not always have the direct overview of quality control they have with the print editions they produce themselves. I hypothesize that this is especially bad at the moment as publishers are mass-moving their catalogs into e-book format, making it especially difficult to individually review each title.
- The existing state of e-book viewers and production tools suboptimal. Markup which causes the ReaderWorks LIT-generation tool to produce a decent-looking LIT book can create a complete mess when used with Mobipocket Creator to produce a Mobipocket book. Even within just the Mobipocket format, renderer differences can result in books which look perfect on one platform but terrible on another. This is somewhat similar to the days of the Web browser wars, only many of the renderers in question are on embedded devices, making them more difficult to update.
Anyway, that's my 0.02 USD.