Tips for finding good Kindle editions of public domain books

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by sun surfer

I think you are referring to the professionally done ones mentioned in the post you quoted and not the fake publishers I mentioned in the post you didn't quote. Either way, I think you are mistaken. For the professional publishers' transfers of their public domain pbooks to ebook:

-they wouldn't have to buy their own book as they'd already have it
-they would already have the equipment to scan in the book including the scanner and OCR reader (and anyway, do you really think big publishers would be worrying about the cost of buying this equipment?)
-the forwards, prefaces and notes would be the same as the ones from their pbook so (and I'm not an expert here but this seems likely) the only legal work to do if any would be the proper transfer of their content rights to the digital realm

That only leaves the proofreading, and we all know how well the big publishers make sure to proofread their ebook versions beforehand. But even factoring in paying the proofreader and whoever's doing the labour of the transfer, then having an ebook that is almost pure profit would surely eventually make that upfront expense up at some point.

Really, I'm not even sure why you decided to discuss this point. If, on the other hand, you meant the fake publishers' versions, well, those people just take some electronic version already out there, slap an amateur cover and 'something' else to have Amazon let it stay ('annotated', a public domain picture, whatever, but usually very amateurishly and quickly done and taken from some other easily findable source), and put it up for sale to try to make a quicky scam buck. There are a very, very few semi-professional ebook publishers of public domain books that try to make more of a quality version worth paying for (such as a huge omnibus proofread and well formatted) compared to a free download from places like here or gutenberg, but even those can have errors and problems and probably also start from an already-online source. Would you care to explain what exactly you meant by your post?

How do you know exactly what the publishers do? Either kind.

What I know is unless there is a demand, big business is not going to waste their time and money.

On the small publishers, you don't have a clue if they got an electronic copy or scanned it themselves.

You are assuming that a person is a fake unless they are employed by a big company.

I mean all publishers.

Now seriously, your best bet is read the one star reviews.


What do you consider a fake publisher? Those are not fake books. I do not appreciate you calling the volunteers here fakes. People spend many hours getting these books ready for public consumption.
On the big publishers, except for Scholastic and Harcourt, there is NO money in public domain. Do you have $600 per book to check for errors? That is the minimum it would cost any publisher. Yes, big business watches costs or they wouldn't be in business.
Time and money are the reasons they don't do it.

If you want to separate the wheat from chaff, take several hours and go through every book of that title.
That is really the only way.

And as far as the big publishers go, they still have OCR errors.

Do not ever tell a poster NOT to join a discussion or ask why they joined the discussion.
If you don't like an opinion, fine. Put the person on ignore or report the post.
Do not call out that poster because that violates the forum guidelines.

Many people here take the time to make sure we do have decent public domain books, do not call them fakes or say it costs nothing.

Do you work for pennies an hour or your spouse?
Then why do you think publishers should?

You want a perfect book, it doesn't exist.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

How do you know exactly what the publishers do? Either kind.

What I know is unless there is a demand, big business is not going to waste their time and money.

On the small publishers, you don't have a clue if they got an electronic copy or scanned it themselves.

You are assuming that a person is a fake unless they are employed by a big company.

I mean all publishers.

Now seriously, your best bet is read the one star reviews.


What do you consider a fake publisher? Those are not fake books. I do not appreciate you calling the volunteers here fakes. People spend many hours getting these books ready for public consumption.
On the big publishers, except for Scholastic and Harcourt, there is NO money in public domain. Do you have $600 per book to check for errors? That is the minimum it would cost any publisher. Yes, big business watches costs or they wouldn't be in business.
Time and money are the reasons they don't do it.

I think sun surfer's point is reasonable. There's a lot of public domain chaff sold on Amazon, where people just upload a copy and slap on a price. He also seems willing to pay for a quality edition; the difficulty is finding them. And there are several publishers who presumably make money from public domain books; they add copyright content as well as providing a clean edition. I also don't see where he referred to any uploaders here as fake. Please don't misrepresent what another poster says.

The reviews at Amazon are useless in this context, since Amazon has a regrettable tendency to conflate the reviews of all editions of a title.

Do not ever tell a poster NOT to join a discussion or ask why they joined the discussion.
If you don't like an opinion, fine. Put the person on ignore or report the post.
Do not call out that poster because that violates the forum guidelines.

sun surfer did not tell you not to join the discussion. Again, don't misrepresent another poster. He is entitled to disagree with your comments. Moreover, it is a violation of forum guidelines to accuse another poster of being in violation. Please don't do it. I can only refer you to your own advice; if you have an issue with a post or a poster, please report it.

[haydnfan]

Penguin classics when they decide to be cheap ($1-2). The others tend to be hit and miss. It's worth the extra effort to just download from Gutenberg and sideload. It will be guaranteed to be well formatted IMO.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by haydnfan

Penguin classics when they decide to be cheap ($1-2). The others tend to be hit and miss. It's worth the extra effort to just download from Gutenberg and sideload. It will be guaranteed to be well formatted IMO.

sun surfer prefers to buy from Amazon because of add-on functionality that doesn't apply to side-loaded content, is my understanding.

I've had issues with poorly formatted Gutenberg books.

[knc1]

Originally Posted by issybird

sun surfer prefers to buy from Amazon because of add-on functionality that doesn't apply to side-loaded content, is my understanding.

I've had issues with poorly formatted Gutenberg books.

If you sort-of keep a mental track of when the book was converted, you can spot the trend.

In the very early days, they used very early character recognition (and had a small number of editors), the result was sometime unreadable.
At least until your mind adapted to doing the "what I see" -> "what the converter saw" translation.

Also, you will see that Gutenberg is aware of those poor quality books and is working to re-do them.
For some, several times now since the first posting.

Of course they are, in general, going by popularity.
So if you have a book that only you and the author ever read . . . .

[issybird]

Originally Posted by knc1

Of course they are, in general, going by popularity.
So if you have a book that only you and the author ever read . . . .

Indeed!

I've been aware of the date correlation. And I mean no criticism of Project Gutenberg; it was one of the great days of my life when I found it and saw all those books I'd despaired of ever finding on a dusty shelf in a used book shop were there for the reading. It's just unfortunate that we can't quite make a blanket recommendation for good formatting at Gutenberg and the errors have been promulgated by the cheesy uploads at Amazon. That said, the classics are presumably safe for the reason you mention; anything that Oxford, Penguin et al. would publish likely has a clean copy at Gutenberg.

[knc1]

I have a copy of their "War and Peace" -
It has been edited more than once.
I can't even imagine having the time to just read it once, let alone edit it.

The classics and the popular works are getting a lot of care and attention.

- - - - -

A neighbor wanted to read it, so I put it on a PW1 and lent it out.
Took my neighbor all summer (I live where "summer" is 9 months long) to read it.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by knc1

I have a copy of their "War and Peace" -
It has been edited more than once.
I can't even imagine having the time to just read it once, let alone edit it.

The classics and the popular works are getting a lot of care and attention.

- - - - -

A neighbor wanted to read it, so I put it on a PW1 and lent it out.
Took my neighbor all summer (I live where "summer" is 9 months long) to read it.

It does being to mind one of my rules of thumb; when it comes to public domain works in translation, especially the ones that will be a slog at best (W&P, Don Quixote, etc.) pay the money for a recent translation instead of going the free route. You'll never make a better investment in terms of value for time spent!