What Price Quality?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by ficbot

Harry, I would love to help with the 'good public domain editions' goal, but am not sure where to start. Do I download from Project Gutenberg and fix them in Sigil? Join the PG distributed proofreaders? Can you share a little more about your work process?

Yes, download from PG, and then get hold of a printed edition of the book; you can generally find good PDF page scans at http://www.archive.org. If I can't find one there, I buy a cheap 2nd-hand printed text from Amazon (an old battered one is absolutely fine for proofing with). Read the eBook and the scanned page in parallel and, whenever you find an error, make the correction in the eBook in whatever your favourite editor is (Sigil is fine for ePubs).

It takes a little practice to be able to read and compare two texts in parallel, but it's by far the best way to pick up errors, especially things of the order of missing commas, quotation marks, etc, which are by far the most common type of error in an eBook.

I'm currently proof-reading E.F. Benson's "Queen Lucia" and am finding at least a dozen errors on every page. There can easily be thousands of errors in an average length eBook.

[Pulpmeister]

Agreed. The only PG editions I fiddle with are those I already have as a paper copy. And yes, tedious but essential. It's amazing what can slip through. Many years ago I had a book published, which I checked and rechecked before sending off to the publisher, re-read it many times over the years, then converted it to an e-book and whoops! spotted a noticeable error, which was in the printed book as well all this time. Oh well...

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by crossi

He assured his wife that to ensure that he didn't lose money, he insured his holiday.

Are you sure?

[gweeks]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Yes, download from PG, and then get hold of a printed edition of the book; you can generally find good PDF page scans at http://www.archive.org. If I can't find one there, I buy a cheap 2nd-hand printed text from Amazon (an old battered one is absolutely fine for proofing with).

If the printed edition came out after the PG one there is a very good chance it's just the PG one typeset on paper with no further proofing. It's much better to get an older copy that was printed before PG did their edition.

Greg Weeks

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by gweeks

If the printed edition came out after the PG one there is a very good chance it's just the PG one typeset on paper with no further proofing. It's much better to get an older copy that was printed before PG did their edition.

Greg Weeks

Yes, agreed. Most of the page scans at archive.org are from the 19th or early 20th century; that's what makes them such good sources for proofing against. They are also, as a side issue, an excellent source of illustrations for books, which are very often missing from the PG versions (the earlier PG versions, at least).