Where to get classics which are properly formatted?

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by ProfCrash

See, I learn something every day. The books that I have read did not appear to have errors, or anything that I noticed. I was under the impression that MobileReference proofread the versions they were using and fixed the errors found in them.

From the individual books of MobileReference that I've checked, they do no such thing, just take the Project Gutenberg text and crudely format it for Kindle.

The two from them I've looked at are Kipling's Kim and Stevenson's Kidnapped.

MobileReference's editions didn't stand out in any way from the vast majority of the version on Amazon. My reviews read:

Kim:

No italics. Straight quotes. Dashes are hyphens. Paragraph breaks are often lost, and verses run together. Knobbiest for Knowest.

Kidnapped:

Paragraph formatting has a small gap between paragraphs as well as a small indent. Chapter titles are not distinguished from the text. Straight quotes, CAPS instead of smallcaps. Double hyphens instead of dashes. I can't tell from the sample how it handles footnotes. It doesn't seem to have extra notes. It does appear to have a short biography of RLS at the end. It DOES have a Table of Contents link the in menu, and the Table of contents is hyperlinked. No maps. Opens to Table of contents. Preface and dedication.

No real advantage over the free version available at Project Gutenberg. There are much better Kindle versions available. (Yes, including the one that I publish, but not just that one. )

The Project Gutenberg version of Kidnapped isn't too bad, so neither are the various versions in the Kindle Store. But very few have any advantage over what you can get directly from Project Gutenberg, and you can get better free versions here than nearly all the versions at the Kindle store.

[FizzyWater]

Originally Posted by neonbible

OMG thank you! ..all of you. The books on here look great. Just got illustrated versions of Oliver Twist and Sherlock Holmes. All formatted well with ToC.

Originally Posted by HarryT

I don't think God had very much to do with it. It was I who produced both the books that you mention.

OMM [oh-my-mod] just doesn't look as good in print.