Legitimate Publishers using Pirated Ebooks as Source

[murg]

Originally Posted by copyrite

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

Good question.

Basically, the contents had the appearance of a scanned book which has been mostly proofed. The main errors were punctuation, especially missing quotes. A few instances of scan errors (be not he, fetch not fletch), but not consistently.

But, due to your query, I checked.

It turns out that the Amazon ebook is worse than an alternatively available version. It is either a fresh scan or an earlier version of an alternatively available version. I doubt it is a fresh scan, as it looks too proofed for that.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by murg

Good question.

Basically, the contents had the appearance of a scanned book which has been mostly proofed. The main errors were punctuation, especially missing quotes. A few instances of scan errors (be not he, fetch not fletch), but not consistently.

But backlist ebooks are generally created by OCR when no digital copy is available. How do your observations lead you to the conclusion that your book is "obviously sourced from a pirated book" rather than from a scan made by the publisher?

[GlennD]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

"Finally, I owe a special debt of thanks to Melissa Houle, one of the Web mistresses from www.rhemuthcastle.com, who scanned me the text from her beloved copy of Deryni Rising and probably broke its spine in the process. These first three books, and the three books of the Camber Trilogy, were all written on a typewriter, with carbon copies, in the dark ages before personal computers and word processing. Her kindness has saved me many hours of retyping the manuscript, so that preparing this edition took far less time out of my work on the next new Deryni novel. Another fan has already scanned Deryni Checkmate for me, and I have no doubt that a digital copy of High Deryni will be ready by the time I need to crank it through my machine."

I remember seeing this and wondering if perhaps her kind friend had downloaded a pirated copy. Ms. Kurtz probably doesn't need to know that, if so. It just seems like a little karma to me, if authors can benefit from the piracy of their work (which is often justified because something isn't 'in print') to get an ebook edition published.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by GlennD

I remember seeing this and wondering if perhaps her kind friend had downloaded a pirated copy. Ms. Kurtz probably doesn't need to know that, if so. It just seems like a little karma to me, if authors can benefit from the piracy of their work (which is often justified because something isn't 'in print') to get an ebook edition published.

In general, I tend to differentiate between a true pirate site (i.e. someone trying to profit from someone else's copyrighted material) and people who scanned in copies of their favorite books and shared them with other fans. Way back before ebook stores were common, there was quite the cooperative effort to scan and proof books. You had multiple iterations of people proofing and fixing errors in some of the more popular books, which lead to some pretty well proofed books. It was very much a labor of love for some involved, much like the PD efforts we see here and on PG.

[murg]

Originally Posted by HarryT

But backlist ebooks are generally created by OCR when no digital copy is available. How do your observations lead you to the conclusion that your book is "obviously sourced from a pirated book" rather than from a scan made by the publisher?

Well, the first observation was the basis of this thread: the first book has many of the exact same flaws as an unauthorised version.

Therefore it is reasonable to posit that the publishers, in both cases the Estate, would have the same M.O. in publishing the books.

The second book was exhibiting many of the same types of flaws. While they were scan errors, someone had obviously done a proofing job in it, but not a professional one, more like a rushed one by someone who scanned the book, ran a spell check on it, and got it out to wherever unauthorised books are released to.

I think that if the second book was a fresh scan, greater care would have been taken to proof it. In fact, the second book is of a much poorer quality than the first book. I think that the Estate may have been in the throes of discovering how much work it takes to proof a scanned book.

I'm sure that if I were to look for additional alternative versions of the book, I'd probably find the version it was cloned from. But frankly, I'd rather just read the book than try to prove its providence.

[JwkOKC]

Originally Posted by theducks

When was the last time you saw a working CPM machine (not in a museum)?
Did it have 8" floppies or 5.25" floppies?

I would be surprised if data was recoverable without extraordinary (expensive) means.
Old Early floppies tend to jam in their sleeves. If it does, the disk is now toast
Data print through/bleed-over is another lurker.

Not saying ALL will fail. I have many open reel tapes (some Quad). The Mylar ones play nicely, the acetate ones ) Good quality media, treated nice can survive.

Last time I saw a working CP/M machine was slightly more than 25 years ago. It was a four-user time-shared system, located in my own office at work, and I used it daily. However it was listed in inventory as "surplus scrap" and TPTB took it away to the recyclers one day.

Didn't have floppies at all -- 5 MB hard disk was its only storage!

Floppies, both 8-inch and 5-inch, tended to vary widely in quality. Those from 3M had a tendency to lose their oxide coating within weeks. CDC, however, knew how to make them. I still have several file boxes of the 5-inch variety, maybe 500 platters in all, and only a couple of years ago gave away a pair of quad-density (double-sided, double-density on each side) full-height drives that gave me more than a megabyte of storage on my TRS-80 Mod 4 back in the day. However it's been years since I attempted to recover data from any of the disks.

Jerry was quite active on CompuServe back in the 80s, and probably does have copies of his original manuscripts (unless mechanical issues have destroyed the discs over time) but in those days, there were many steps between the original script and the printed page, each step adding additional value. The script had to be first edited, then proofed. Next, it required transfer to the Quark system, which became the standard for professional typesetting software, and after a fresh round of proofing, was ready to go to the presses.

I had personal experience of this with one book on which Ralf Brown and I collaborated in the early-90s. It was so highly technical that Ralf and I insisted on bypassing the entire complicated process, and having the final plates created directly from our submitted WinWord manuscript, which we had carefully proofed.

The first edition was in many ways a minor disaster, although it got good reviews and sold well enough to encourage A-W to do a second edition later. I had been called out of town at a critical point, leaving Ralf to do the final update of one area -- and not being as familiar with WinWord as I had become at that point, he forgot to insert a critical closing command with the result that one page turned into a jumbled mass of characters.

All of which I offer as good reason why Dr. Pournelle would request copies of the printed versions, rather than relying on any saved copies of original manuscripts.

It's really been a wild ride, watching how far publishing has advanced in the past 65 years!

[JwkOKC]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Hmmm. The first step after doing an OCR is generally a spell-check. "Ineant" is not, to the best of my knowledge, a real world, and should have been picked up at that stage. Sounds like a very shoddy job.

What was the book?

Having made this exact same error more times than I can remember, I was a bit amused to find you did the same!

Good thing this is a (mostly) friendly bunch. I greatly love the atmosphere here!

My favorite OCR blooper isn't caught by any spell-check, though. That's "bum" for "burn" (and vice versa). Double lower-case "l"s often turn into "m"s, also, and frequently the result is still a valid word....

[bgalbrecht]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

In general, I tend to differentiate between a true pirate site (i.e. someone trying to profit from someone else's copyrighted material) and people who scanned in copies of their favorite books and shared them with other fans. Way back before ebook stores were common, there was quite the cooperative effort to scan and proof books. You had multiple iterations of people proofing and fixing errors in some of the more popular books, which lead to some pretty well proofed books. It was very much a labor of love for some involved, much like the PD efforts we see here and on PG.

This may be true but I think it was the exception rather than the rule. When I first started reading ebooks, I looked at a few pirated ebooks, and most of them seemed to be OCRd with little or no proofreading and not worth keeping. I haven't looked at any pirated ebooks in years, but my impression was that most of the pirates were no longer scanning print books, just removing the DRM from publishers' ebooks.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by bgalbrecht

This may be true but I think it was the exception rather than the rule. When I first started reading ebooks, I looked at a few pirated ebooks, and most of them seemed to be OCRd with little or no proofreading and not worth keeping. I haven't looked at any pirated ebooks in years, but my impression was that most of the pirates were no longer scanning print books, just removing the DRM from publishers' ebooks.

Once again, define pirates. People who are grabbing someone else's books for profit, yea, they tend to put a minimum amount of effort into it. I see those books pop up every so often on Amazon. The hobbyists who are doing it because they enjoy doing it and try to put the best product out there.

I haven't followed all of that since Amazon came out with the Kindle, but back then, you saw very few books that were de-drm'ed copies in the various feeds. Maybe in the true pirate sites, but I've never visited any of those. One hears very little buzz about the pirate sites these days. It simply doesn't appear to be much of an issue in the Western world.