Do you correct your ebooks?

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by tompe

I find it very strange that people fix problem if they then cannot contribute the fixes back to people. I would never fix a book I bought to read it myself. If it was very broken I would return the book.

Not returning badly formatted DRMed books give the wrong signal to the seller.

I've not had a badly formatted book (so far, knocks on wood). And I re-read my books. So, when I re-read it, those small mistakes are corrected as I won't re-read the original, but the updated version.

[Stitchawl]

Never. I'm not bothered by poorly OCR'd material or extra line brakes. If I can follow the flow of the story, and figure out the intended word, I have no desire to stop my reading to fix a mistake. If I were passing my books on to others it would be a different case, but as long as I can read it, it's fine just for me.

Stitchawl

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by Stitchawl

Never. I'm not bothered by poorly OCR'd material or extra line brakes. If I can follow the flow of the story, and figure out the intended word, I have no desire to stop my reading to fix a mistake. If I were passing my books on to others it would be a different case, but as long as I can read it, it's fine just for me.

Stitchawl

I don't stop to fix a mistake. I just highlight a sentence, part of a sentence or word. And later, when I'm done with reading the book, I'll fix the original file. I've been doing for as long as I've been reading mobipocket books (my original reader, the Franklin eBookman, also had a touch screen)

[rogue_ronin]

Originally Posted by Amalthia

I fix the easy stuff if I can. And I add covers to books that don't have them. But finding covers that are good is a real pain.

I recently made 10 covers for the Barsoom Series by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

It was way more work than editing the ebooks -- but fun! If you're into making stuff from found objects, it rocks. (I found all the figure art on the web, then cut/changed it to suit a visual motif.)

It's interesting to look at them as they went along. I think I hit my peak at number three, but I leveled out higher than I started.

I'm going to knock together the 7 remaining ebooks Real Soon Now™ -- which, altogether will probably take less time than a single cover. But my source files are pretty good. (PG texts that I proofread a couple of years ago.)

I actually did this, in black and white, back when I was making ebooks for the REB1100, too. I pretty much hated the dithered covers that a straight import would get. If you have a minimalist aesthetic, you can come up with some nice stuff.

I did a monochrome cover for every Robert Heinlein short story, all from clipart and found images. Some are junk, but some are quite nice. It's worth the effort (although it's probably overkill for short stories.) And the covers could perhaps be shared, even if the texts cannot.

m a r

ps: the REB1100 is genius for proofreading -- read, bookmark, add note, read, etc. I think you could use rbmake to explode the text with the markup included -- so then you could correct within a note, using a standard format, and write regex to edit the file. At the very least, you could go from bookmark to bookmark easily.

pps: As I'm now mostly reading on my Nokia (and someday my Q7) I wish the FBreader guys would quit messing around with the java version of the reader, and add bookmarks to the standard version. And CSS, too. And tables. </grumble>

[Xiaopanda]

Never ever ever do I correct my books. I generaly read em once, so there is no real point!

If a conversion i s too messy to deal with, I forget the book, and I'm yet to come across a book that I am DYING to read in E Version.......Untill the Song of Ice and Fire continues, anyway!

[Jellby]

I do correct them, all the time.

If it's a book I created, reading and correcting is part of the creation process.
If it's a book someone (in MR) else created, I note the mistakes and inform the creator. Sometimes I create my own version too.
If it's a book I bought... I haven't bought any I plan to correct them and inform the publisher, though.

[HarryT]

I very, very much welcome being informed about mistakes in the books that I've uploaded to MR (thanks, Jellby!), and I always correct them and upload a new version, as I do for the books which I read myself.

[Ea]

I add covers if I can find a good one without too much trouble, but I don't feel bothered enough by errors to spend the time to correct them. The errors annoy me, but spending time on them annoy me, too

[pdurrant]

This is pretty much my position too. Since with Mobipocket and a CyBook I can browse by cover, I like to make sure that all my ebooks have a good cover. But I can't be bothered to do textual corrections.

If it's a particularly bad problem, I'll report it to the publisher. But except for Fictionwise Multiformat and Baen books, I've rarely had a positive response.

Of course, if it's a book I created, I'll fix things. Or if it's one downloaded from Mobileread I'll inform the uploader.

Originally Posted by Ea

I add covers if I can find a good one without too much trouble, but I don't feel bothered enough by errors to spend the time to correct them. The errors annoy me, but spending time on them annoy me, too

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

This is pretty much my position too. Since with Mobipocket and a CyBook I can browse by cover, I like to make sure that all my ebooks have a good cover. But I can't be bothered to do textual corrections.

If it's a particularly bad problem, I'll report it to the publisher. But except for Fictionwise Multiformat and Baen books, I've rarely had a positive response.

Of course, if it's a book I created, I'll fix things. Or if it's one downloaded from Mobileread I'll inform the uploader.

Actually, it's the reverse for me. I couldn't care less about the cover (mobipocket doesn't show it anyway, and I'll only see it once, when I open the book).

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

Actually, it's the reverse for me. I couldn't care less about the cover (mobipocket doesn't show it anyway, and I'll only see it once, when I open the book).

On the CyBook, the cover image is the primary method of choosing a book in the library, so it matters a lot for CyBook owners.

[bgalbrecht]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

I do. I get most of my books from free sources such as Project Gutenberg, and frequently find OCR errors. Bugs me.

Feel free to send an email to errata AT gutenberg.org with the details (replacing AT with @) of course. If it's not reported, it can't get fixed.