[FuzzyGamer]

I'm sorry if this is not constructive, but of all the people I can bother with this (and expect some sort of answer), it would be the readers of this forum.

I am reading "1984", the copy that came with the 500 Reader, and it has convinced me entirely that the people who supply Sony with books sometimes do so by scanning a pbook and little else. I was fairly sure of this fact a few weeks ago, but now my suspicions have been confirmed. "1984" has such spelling errors as "tune" instead of "time". Look at the two words and you'll see that it's fairly simple for a computer to confuse "im" for "un". Similar errors are found throughout, be it spacing, capitalization, or simply missing a period at the end of a sentence (the period is close a letter like 'k' or 'g', or something that has a "thingy" at the bottom right).

My question (and partial rant) is this: why do the "publishers" need to scan a pbook to generate an e-book? Hasn't the industry switched to digital? Just go get the .txt file (or whatever) and port it to the Reader format. It's not hard. Why do they need to scan a book when, I'm assuming, there's a perfectly "functional" digital copy of the book somewhere. And also, why do the "publishers" not check the book? I'm not even saying that a human should read the digitized version (that would be asking too much off, wouldn't it?), but simply run the copy through Word or something. I've seen two instances in "1984" where the OCR software spat out numbers, so instead of "Winston", it read something like "Win-148-on". Argh!

We're paying money for these books, not "1984", but others, which have been digitized in this fashion, like "Flatland", and the "publishers" don't even have the decency to use a good source or double-check their work?!

That being said, I still love my Reader and will not stop carrying it around everywhere I go. I'll just continue to curse Sony and the half-wits at Rosetta Books any time I see an idiotic error that looks like an OCR screw-up.