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Re: Jules Verne E-Book Editions -- Nook

From: James Keeline <keeline~at~yahoo.com>
Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 07:45:42 -0700 (PDT)
To: Jules Verne Forum <jvf~at~gilead.org.il>


I have the software for the nook and Kindle on my iPhone but don't really have
any books purchased for them yet. I might think differently if I had an iPad, a
good but expensive way to have access to all of the eBook formats. It appears
that both nook and Kindle rely heavily on public domain "sales". Last year
Amazon has posted articles about the sales of eBooks exceeding those of
hardcovers:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-19/amazon-com-says-kindle-sales-accelerated-last-quarter-e-books-pass-print.html


However, they do not indicate how many of those "purchases" are free public
domain content which users download to fill their nook with books they may never
read in the same way that people have purchased the Britannica Great Books to
put on a shelf and once a year glance at the bookcase and say to themselves:
"yes, they're still there."

My mother in law recently purchased a nook and has been reading a lot on it as a
replacement for paperbacks. She obtains some books from the local public
library through some kind of lending program. However, after downloading some
favorite Dickens titles she complained to us about gibberish characters in the
texts. When we saw them it was clear that these were optical character
recognition (OCR) errors which had not been caught in proofreading.

This reminded us of our project to reissue the first five Tom Swift books from
1910 for a 100th anniversary edition through Lulu. We obtained the texts from
Project Gutenberg but were surprised to find, after all of the time they have
been available, that there were still so many errors remaining. My wife and I
read through the texts and found dozens of errors in each one when compared with
the vintage copies.

Project Gutenberg does have a Distributed Proofreaders project where people can
volunteer to edit books. However, this is probably done for newer releases
rather than the ones that have been available for years.

For Verne this likely means that there are not only the bad translations rampant
but also additional errors which may harm the author's stature in the eyes of
casual readers who are not aware of these issues.

It is interesting that the offerings for Kindle vs. nook may vary so much in
terms of the modern translations of Verne. One has to wonder how much this
carries over to other books. It certainly could be a factor in deciding which
reader platform to buy. It's not just price but whether the books you want are
(or will be) available for it. Of course, with the iPhone/iPad/Android option
of installing nook and Kindle software then you have all (or most) options open
to you.

James D. Keeline
Received on Mon 23 May 2011 - 17:45:54 IDT

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