Quote:
Originally Posted by Strether
Having heard about Steven Saylor's mysteries set in ancient Rome, I recently bought the first in the series, Roman Blood, from Amazon. Alas, it turned out to be a Topaz-formatted book. Very ugly and with slow-turning pages, but obviously had been scanned and the errors were legion. Especially hyphenated words that had come at the end of a line in the printed text, but were inappropriate if they came anywhere else, which they did in the ebook. I could only read it for 3 or 4 chapters, then stopped and asked Customer Service to refund my money, which they obligingly did.
Normally, I'd be on the lookout for Topaz books, but this one snuck in on me. Looking at the rest of the series, I see they're all formatted the same way. I wonder if the author knows/cares that they're so poorly produced?
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Steven Saylor seems to be happy to exchange email with his fans. He's the one who told me about the UK mass market edition of "The Triumph of Caesar", which is the only way to buy it in anything close to US MM format now that his US publisher is going for maximum revenue per unit and releasing the books only as trade paperbacks. I doubt if he'll know what a botch they've made of his books unless someone tells him. His contact info is on his website. Also, he's a really cool guy.
As for the comparison between free public-domain ebooks (Project Gutenberg, etc.) and commercially produced ebooks: I only buy ebooks from Baen, and I haven't found significant problems, but that's probably because Baen, being a SF specialty house founded by one forward-looking man, has probably had good electronic copies of those books from the get-go, and no need to scan/OCR them. From what I'm reading in this thread, some of what's turned out by the major publishing houses is barely spell-checked and not proofread at all. Project Gutenberg (and sites like Feedbooks and Manybooks, which scrape PG) have the benefit of the Distributed Proofreading project (have you proofread a page today?). Via PGDP, several separate human beings proofread every page of every scan, in several rounds of proofreading, and while some errors undoubtedly creep through (and there are more of them in books created prior to the formation of PGDP), by and large the quality is
much higher than the "OCR it and ship it" books from the major publishers.
Y'know, if publishers were smart, they'd so something like that themselves: a system like PGDP, where you could register as a proofreader and get credit based on your accuracy in proofreading (as determined by a comparison of some significant number of people proofing each page) and number of pages you did, which would be applied towards the purchase price of that book once it is finished and released. There's probably some complicated problem involving minimum wage laws that prohibits it, but it still seems like a good idea. At least that way, ebooks would suck less.
Or, if they paid a bunch of college students (or even random people on the Web) ten bucks an hour to proofread OCR'd scans, they could proofread a 200-page book for under $500. It wouldn't take much of an increase in sales once word got around (hey, did you hear BigPubCo's ebooks are better than everyone else's?) to cover that.