Finally Eddings & MacLean

[crossi]

Finally ebooks by Alistair MacLean and David Eddings are showing up as ebooks. For the Eddings just the Polgara and Belgarath books so far but I have hopes for the rest.

[AnemicOak]

Good to know. They've both been available from the UK for quite a while.

[Katsunami]

I've bought many through Kobo UK and BooksOnBoard in the past. I actually have all of them, except for the Dreams series, which I didn't like, so I didn't replace the paperbacks.

[mgbino]

I bought the U.K. ebooks. I was pretty disappointed in the amount of OCR errors in them. Maybe the U.S. ones will be cleaner.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by mgbino

I bought the U.K. ebooks. I was pretty disappointed in the amount of OCR errors in them. Maybe the U.S. ones will be cleaner.

I have encountered those, yes. Some books are better or worse than others. Two of them suffered from missing all the ellipsis after "but".

"You will stay here."
- "But "
"Just do as you're told."

Instead of "But..."

[crossi]

OCR errors are a problem from some sloppy publishers (I'm talking big publishers not self published). One Linda Howard book had for the entire book each instance of "his skin" written as "hiss kin". Very distracting. They must have done a spell check but not actually read the output.

[mgbino]

Yeah, the Eddings ones were bad, but nearly as bad some I've encountered. I bought the whole Deathgate Cycle series only to discover that most of the 'I"'s were rendered as "1" and random text was bold. They were so bad, I ended up downloading pirated copies that fans had cleaned up

I find this is a problem with a lot of old fantasy/sci-fi, unfortunately.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by mgbino

Yeah, the Eddings ones were bad

Maybe you have very old versions. I'm rereading this series as we speak (bought the books about a year ago), and the only mistakes I found were these:

- All "But..." were rendered as "But "
- Sometimes, words such as "corner" were rendered as "comer", "hit" -> hlt".

There weren't enough errors to complain about, IMHO.

If you did acquire the books uh... somewhat less legally.... then you may have versions that are REALLY bad. (Yes, I found those, before the actual official ones became available, but I was unable to read them because of general suckiness, so I just decided to wait for the official ones.)

[crossi]

That is bad. They must not even have run it through spellcheck. There is no excuse for being that sloppy.

[mgbino]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Maybe you have very old versions. I'm rereading this series as we speak (bought the books about a year ago), and the only mistakes I found were these:

- All "But..." were rendered as "But "
- Sometimes, words such as "corner" were rendered as "comer", "hit" -> hlt".

There weren't enough errors to complain about, IMHO.

If you did acquire the books uh... somewhat less legally.... then you may have versions that are REALLY bad. (Yes, I found those, before the actual official ones became available, but I was unable to read them because of general suckiness, so I just decided to wait for the official ones.)

Nope, they were legit, bought from amazon.uk ebooks. Those were the errors I was talking about too... I guess I'm pickier than you

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by crossi

Finally ebooks by Alistair MacLean and David Eddings are showing up as ebooks. For the Eddings just the Polgara and Belgarath books so far but I have hopes for the rest.

Actually those specific Eddings books have been in the Amazon kindle store for a while. Thanks for the pointers on the MacLean books. I had the Guns of Navarone and Ice Station Zebra, but there were quite a few of his other books that I had been looking for.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by mgbino

Nope, they were legit, bought from amazon.uk ebooks. Those were the errors I was talking about too... I guess I'm pickier than you

I was picky too, at least when I started ereading, but thus has diminished greatly since books became better and better. Now I only check if there are no errors in the EPUB, put in correct metadata remove fonts and whitespace between paragraphs, and then I read. Trying to craft each and every book to utmost perfection costs too much time.