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If you compare the formatting, you'll notice the difference.
Most uploaders here take the source text from sites like Project Gutenberg (PG), but those texts have usually very simple layout and formatting, and are not offered in all the ebook formats people may want (ePUB has only recently been an option at PG). Adding chapter breaks, hyperlinked table of contents, formatting poetry and letters, including illustrations, etc. are some of the things that make the ebooks here "better" than the PG sources.
Then comes the proofreading. PG texts have often dozens of OCR and typographical errors, missing diacritics, missing italics... By comparing the text with a printed edition of the book, or just by reading it carefully, most of these can be detected and corrected, which improves again the quality of the uploads hosted here.
Moreover, it is not a duplication of effort. We use the PG texts as a starting point and work from there. The effort already spent in creating the PG texts is greatly appreciated, and it's not lost, as it allows us to skip the scanning and OCR stages or to work on books we don't have access to.
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