Penguin epub full of errors

[iozy]

I just bought a Penguin epub from WH Smith... the complete essays of Montaigne.

I was shocked and disappointed to find many serious errors and mistakes even from a cursory initial glance through the text. In many instances words are missing or repeated, to be replaced by full stops or dashes. Most of the instances of the word 'I' are replaced with a '.', so you get sentences like:

". am among those who are most free from this emotion: . neither like it nor think well of it".

Sometimes there are several words missing with just a dash in their place.

So it looks like OCR mistakes.. but this is a Penguin book straight from the publisher, I was hoping/assuming they would use the original source text used to produce the print paperback.

Versions of this work are available free online in ebook form, I decided to pay a premium for this Penguin edition to be sure of getting a complete and trustworthy text in a great translation... I wish I could cut and paste bits of this text to show you all how bad it is. OK the Gutenberg translation isn't as good and doesn't have all the footnotes and introductions but at least it is readable and proof corrected... oh and free!

I am seriously shocked and disappointed that a 20GBP ebook could have been produced so haphazardly and seemingly without any care or quality control. I wouldn't mind a few little mistakes in a 1000+ page ebook, but this is happening five or six times on every single page

I'm using Adobe Digital Editions on a Mac. If I click on document info, there is a section that says 'The document appears to have minor errors that might cause it to be displayed incorrectly'. Hmm.

I'm not sure if this is a problem with Adobe, or if this will ever be fixed, or if I am entitled to a refund.

[JSWolf]

I'd ask for a refund if it was me.

[tompe]

Me too. There must be some feedback so they stop issuing sub standard books.

[iozy]

Well I've emailed WH Smith and Penguin of course but have yet to receive a response... it would take days for a human to proofread a long and complicated text such as this one, I doubt it will ever get corrected. I don't know what the WHSmith policy is on refunds, I just didn't expect this from a brand new Penguin epub title...

[dpierron]

I had the same problem with a novel I bought at Fictionwise, and they took care of communicating with the publisher, pushing them to correct the errors, and emailed me when the corrected version had been uploaded. Way to go !

[iozy]

was it a Penguin?

[dpierron]

Nope, sorry, but I thought it would be good to mention it anyway, since Fictionwise response to the problem was so good...

I never fail to give good publicity to good actions