[HarryT]

One of the problems with PG is that in its early years, books were hand-typed, and not unnaturally, the books that people wanted first tended to be the real classics. Consequently there are some really well-known books on PG which are in an absolutely shocking state.

A good example is Dickens' "The Old Curiosity Shop". Having created the version that you can download from here originally from the PG text, I spent several months proofing it line-by-line against a good printed edition. and found, amongst other things, two complete double pages of text which were entirely missing from the PG version, many other less egrarious omissions (several whole paragraphs, numerous lines), and many, many thousands of more minor errors. And it's that PG edition that virtually all the commercial eBooks of "The Old Curiosity Shop" are created from.

The version that you can now download from MR - the fully-proofed one - is now in a pretty good state, and should rival any printed edition for accuracy.

This is why I have always maintained that there are no shortcuts for good eBook creation. You HAVE to proof-read, and that's a process which takes hundreds of hours of work for a single book.