Legitimate Publishers using Pirated Ebooks as Source

[Robotech_Master]

Originally Posted by gweeks

I know Baen did this for The Witches of Karres. It was a starting point though and went through a full proofing step. When I did The Hunter Returns for Baen we started with the PGCanada text of Fire-Hunter. But again, Baen inserted it into their workflow as if it had come from an author and ran it through their normal proofing process.

When I interviewed Diane Duane for the TeleRead podcast, she mentioned doing that herself for some of her backlist titles that had never been issued as "official" e-books when she needed to put them in her own e-book store. (She did go through and exhaustively proof them first, though.)

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by copyrite

It was a category romance backlist.

If I kept a list of all the texts from me and to me that "guessed" the wrong word... it would be a very long list!

I'm guessing it was a Harlequin Treasury title? I've read a lot of them and many of them have horrible errors in them that to my knowledge have never been fixed.

[copyrite]

Originally Posted by Blossom

I'm guessing it was a Harlequin Treasury title? I've read a lot of them and many of them have horrible errors in them that to my knowledge have never been fixed.

It was a Silhouette title. Funny how much worse the errors got as the book went on... the proof reader either got lazy/sloppy... or quit!

[badgoodDeb]

Originally Posted by copyrite

It was a Silhouette title. Funny how much worse the errors got as the book went on... the proof reader either got lazy/sloppy... or quit!

Or got engrossed in the story and stopped noticing the errors!

[Little.Egret]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Backlist ebook releases are often produced by OCR. Reputable publishers make at least some attempt to correct the inevitable errors that result, of course.

I have a first edition David Brin hc with OCR errors.

Brightness Reef from 1995 I think it was.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by Little.Egret

I have a first edition David Brin hc with OCR errors.

Brightness Reef from 1995 I think it was.

I'm a little confused. Are you saying that you have an ebook version of a first edition HC book that has OCR errors, or that the original HC has OCR errors?

[murg]

I'm now reading the second book of the series, The Mouse on the Moon, and it is obviously sourced from a pirated book.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by murg

I'm now reading the second book of the series, The Mouse on the Moon, and it is obviously sourced from a pirated book.

What features of it make it obvious?

[Little.Egret]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

I'm a little confused. Are you saying that you have an ebook version of a first edition HC book that has OCR errors, or that the original HC has OCR errors?

The original HC.

[copyrite]

Originally Posted by murg

I'm now reading the second book of the series, The Mouse on the Moon, and it is obviously sourced from a pirated book.

How d'ya know it's not a poor scan that wasn't properly OCR'd/checked?

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Little.Egret

The original HC.

Perhaps you mean it has typographic errors? It seems unlikely that the text of the original HC printing was OCRed from another source. Although I suppose if the author submitted a typescript it's just possible.

[latepaul]

Originally Posted by HarryT

One specific example is the "SF Gateway" back catalogue range. All created by OCR and very well proofed.

I've had mixed experience with them. The copy of Greg Bear's "Blood Music" was full of errors. I suspect they had some automated process rather than a human proof-reader because there were things like "close" being consistently rendered "dose" and I guess that happened because "dose" would pass a spell-check as a genuine word.

That said, my recent purchase from them has been fine with only a couple of errors.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by latepaul

I've had mixed experience with them. The copy of Greg Bear's "Blood Music" was full of errors. I suspect they had some automated process rather than a human proof-reader because there were things like "close" being consistently rendered "dose" and I guess that happened because "dose" would pass a spell-check as a genuine word.

That said, my recent purchase from them has been fine with only a couple of errors.

Their more recent books are dramatically better than the early ones, and they're to be congratulated in releasing well over 1000 back-list SF and fantasy books, many of them classics. They've released pretty much the complete works of authors such as Harry Harrison, Gordon R. Dickson, Poul Anderson, Gregory Benford, and many, many others.

They are also extremely responsive when it comes to fixing reported errors, and that's a plus plus in my book.

[latepaul]

Actually I just double-checked and it turns out my copy was not the SF Gateway version but one published by Hachette. It was one of those rare ones I bought through Kobo rather than Amazon and it appears it's no longer available in Kobo's store, though I can still download it.

Anyway, apologies for the misinformation.

[Little.Egret]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Perhaps you mean it has typographic errors? It seems unlikely that the text of the original HC printing was OCRed from another source. Although I suppose if the author submitted a typescript it's just possible.

I meant that it had typical OCR errors like dose for close and 'nn' for 'm'

How it got them I don't know. As you say the author's typescript could have been OCR'd or indeed the manuscript re-keyboarded in China by someone who knew no English.