06-04-2012, 07:56 AM | #1 | ||||||||||||
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Delphi Classics - worth the price?
When I first got into eReading, I was very excited to learn about public domain works being downloadable for free. I started thinking of all the classics I'd never read that I could now get stuck into without an investment.
Anyway - the Gutenberg library was nice and the MobileRead library was even better. However, not that long ago I came across the Delphi Classics website. It looked like an organisation had decided to make a business out of repackaging the classics painstakingly proofing OCR scans etc.. to give a professional output at a very modest price. Then I started to see several comments on the high quality of the Delphi Classics works which made me think that the token investment given was worth it for the peace of mind. Anyway - to get to the point, I purchased the complete works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, an author I'm very interested in, and I started reading one of his smaller works, The Eternal Husband. This is what I've found in the first chapter: Quote:
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This is what I found in the first 17 paragraphs! I will of course be reporting these problems. However, has anyone had an experience like this with the Delphi Classics? Are some works better than others? Surely the good reputation they have must come from somewhere. In this case, from a superficial glance, they would have been much better off copying and pasting from the Gutenberg site as none of these errors exist in the version on that site. Last edited by caleb72; 06-04-2012 at 08:31 AM. |
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06-04-2012, 11:41 AM | #2 |
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The attraction of Delphi Classics is the value-add they provide by hunting down a lot of bonus features incorporating them into their "complete public domain works" editions of author's stuff, with good organization and navigable chapters and such. I know I'm certainly not going to bother finding 5 different translations of the Aeneid, much less assemble them into a mega-omnibus with an interlinear Latin-English version.
And they do correct typos and keep adding additional materials as they surface to their existing editions at no extra cost to the original customer, as you can see from their updates page. Sadly, the first of these things is a service one cannot expect from publishers of completely new works being sold at more than triple the price. So overall, while typos may be disappointing, they do try to fix them and I'd say that the Delphi Classics are worth the price, though I personally would only pick them up during coupon sales because I just don't like mega-omnibuses to begin with (and they could do with a bit more NCX nesting to give better navigation of books-within-books, but that's something I can add myself if I really feel like it). |
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06-04-2012, 12:27 PM | #3 |
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I've been working my way through Complete Works of Mark Twain in the Delphi series.
The quality varies from one section to another. Some of the novels do have annoying typographical glitches: typically, the last letter of a word gets moved to the beginning of the next word. But, so far, I've found the short stories, the essays and satires, and the "library of humor" to be pretty well error-free. On balance, the formating and typography is much better than most public-domain works. Based on this particular volume, I'd say they are definitely worth the modest purchase price. As ATDrake mentioned, there's the added bonus of the lesser-known material, plus there's a nice sprinkling of illustrations. Once I've finished with Mark Twain (if I ever do), I'll be looking to buy more of the Delphi series. Mike |
06-04-2012, 01:35 PM | #4 |
Now what?
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Yes - quality can vary highly among different volumes - as mentioned in the above posts - and typos can be quite irritating ... that said:
1. Delphi will correct their texts and issue free updates. Early purchasers (and readers) can help greatly in this process by submitting errors back to the Delphi website - esp. those recurring "substitution" errors that occur throughout a work - and can be rapidly corrected. 2. Delphi's prices for PD works are extremely modest - given the amount of work obviously done with the formatting, collecting of more obscure works & collateral items (photos, reviews, letters, texts in multiple languages, etc.). 3. They do listen to reader suggestions -- producing the Dickens evolumes of individual works, or the Mark Twain Lite version. So yes - I think they are worth the price - esp. with Delphi's practice of offering monthly discount codes for purchases over $10. |
06-04-2012, 02:18 PM | #5 | |
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06-04-2012, 09:55 PM | #6 |
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Hmmm - you like the formatting? I actually find that fairly inconsistent, but that is what I'm less likely to complain about.
I understand the point of readers sending corrections and usually I wouldn't mind, Delphi Classics is hardly likely to be a huge operation, but with 12 errors in the first 17 paragraphs it's clear that noone has even looked at this even superficially. Even dumping the text into Word should have revealed most of these errors I would have thought. |
06-06-2012, 05:48 AM | #7 |
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Their books really can't be terribly well proofed at the price they're offering them for - it's an enormously time-consuming and expensive process. I can proof-read about 10 pages an hour, so that would equate to 40 hours work for a 400 page book.
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06-06-2012, 07:24 AM | #8 | |
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I was hoping at least for an initial pass in some kind of automated spelling/grammar checker. You can do that quite quickly after a while. You just need to perform it on the text before you do the epub/mobi formatting part of the process. Maybe I should actually do it for a text myself and see how easy it actually is before I mouth off too much further. I mean I didn't expect perfection, but I did expect a little better than an initial OCR scan that's all. As I said before, the text available on Gutenberg is better by an order of magnitude and that did surprise me a little. |
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06-06-2012, 07:27 AM | #9 | ||
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06-06-2012, 07:53 AM | #10 | |
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Quote:
The collections are worth the price to me...though some of them are huge! |
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06-06-2012, 08:46 AM | #11 |
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At $3 each they are not bad in terms of the vastly over priced novels of today. However my standards are pretty low at the $3 level however they still need to have the bugs worked out of the translation process even at that level: no formating mistakes and certainly no editing mistakes. So if what calbe has to say about their books are true then they will need to brush up their editing before I am willing to give them a penny. I don't know about you all but I generally prefer to pay less rather than more.
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06-06-2012, 12:38 PM | #12 | |
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Mike |
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06-06-2012, 12:41 PM | #13 | |
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Quote:
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06-06-2012, 12:45 PM | #14 |
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Me too. I have lots of money, but little time. What time I do have, I prefer to spend reading nicely formatted, error-free books.
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06-08-2012, 10:29 AM | #15 |
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Well - the guys at Delphi Classics were quite nice in the end. I'm running The Brothers Karamazov through Word spelling grammar checking just in case as that will be the next Dostoyevsky book I'll read but I've only found a couple of errors to correct. It may be that because The Eternal Husband was a smaller, more obscure work, that they didn't invest the same amount of time in it.
Actually, proofing is a challenge as I have to distinguish an OCR error from something I have an inclination to correct that was actually in the original work/translation. I can see why HarryT is not satisfied unless performing a one-to-one comparison with a hardback/paperback. |
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