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Re: Jules Verne E-Book Editions -- Nook

From: Alex Kirstukas <infernalnonsense~at~yahoo.com>
Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 13:44:26 -0700 (PDT)
To: Jules Verne Forum <jvf~at~gilead.org.il>

Good points on all sides - I too bemoan the errors and inconsistencies in Project Gutenberg etexts. If all the French etexts of Verne were taken directly from standard Hetzel editions, for instance, imagine how easy our recent attempts at word-counting would have been.

As a Gutenberg contributor myself, however, I'd like to point out that etext errors are easily and

--- On Mon, 5/23/11, James Keeline <keeline~at~yahoo.com> wrote:

From: James Keeline <keeline~at~yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Jules Verne E-Book Editions -- Nook
To: "Jules Verne Forum" <jvf~at~Gilead.org.il>
Date: Monday, May 23, 2011, 11:15 AM

I agree that all books have errors.  However, one should not see any more errors in electronic versions than printed ones.  Indeed, since there is an opportunity to correct them, over time they should get better on the electronic side if work is applied to them.

We have some Richard Marston Elizabethan-era mysteries from Poisoned Pen Press of Arizona, USA.  The books were reissues and probably issued in some print-on-demand fashion.  Little effort was made on these and section breaks inside of chapters were not picked up in their process.  As a result, reading them was not as pleasant as it could be.

For most printed books we see characters misnamed and the wrong, but correctly spelled, word used.  Sometimes there are logical errors.  In the US hardcover of Clive Cussler's Sahara there are two scenes where two sets of characters some 60-75 years apart remove the compass from the instrument panel of a crashed airplane.  I don't know if this was resolved in the paperback edition.

However, editors are paid for their skills and work and one expects them to bring the incidents down to a minimum.  With the Project Gutenberg texts it is all volunteer work and sometimes volume is favored over quality.  It does mean that the slap-dash entrepreneurs who grab a free text or PDF and throw it at a print-on-demand service like Lulu or post it as an e-book probably have as many or more errors than exist in the Project Gutenberg text.  They are not doing anyone any service.  It's the literary equivalent of spam, trying to grab any money they can from people who don't know any better.

From our own experience with the Tom Swift reprints, we know that this takes some work but is not especially lengthy or hard.  Some of the people just don't care.

Even when people try their best, errors can slip in, of course.  At least then the authors, editors, and publishers have tried their best.
 James D. Keeline
_____

http://www.Keeline.com
http://Stratemeyer.org

I purchased a NookColor over the Holidays and have been working/playing with it.
Two things that I have found help greatly are Sigil (http://code.google.com/p/sigil/) and Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/).
Sigil is an editor for various ebook formats. I find this especially useful in converting PDFs to ePub format for my Nook.

Calibre is an eBook library management tool that manages the ebooks you have on you eReader and your computer.
I agree that there are errors in the eBooks, but I have not found them any more numerous that errors in print versions. In fact I compared the e-version of "Coyote" by Allan Steele with the print version, and they both had the same typos and mis-prints (so no additional editing was done to prepare either version).
 Richard Gombert
Received on Mon 23 May 2011 - 23:44:42 IDT

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