A preface: I believe publishing companies are important businesses that should not be treated roughly in any way. Books are important resources that should be respected and shared.
With that said, I received for Christmas a copy of Thomas Carlyle's "The French Revolution" published by General Books LLC from my wife. I was shocked by the absolute lack of editing:
- Chapters starting and stopping in the middle of sentences.
- Weird and profuse use of unusual punctuation like |~ and ^ throughout the work.
- Citations appearing in the middle of paragraphs without any structure.
- Prolific misspellings throughout the work to the point of it being unreadable.
All in all, an unreadable version of a great work. I suspected a translation electronically to Japanese and back, until I read this in tiny print on the front page:
"We have recreated this book from the original using optical recognition software to keep the cost of the book as low as possible. Therefore, could you please forgive any spelling mistakes from smudged or missing pages? If in doubt, please refer to the .pdf file on our site."
So basically this company is either A. buying books, scanning them with a scanner, and then running them through what appears to be Microsoft office's OCR tech (which I have used myself with extremely poor results) or B. downloading .PDFs off line and publishing them. As a lover of books, I can tell you that th
Do not buy books published from this publisher. You can identify them by their empty covers which have a tan base, and black lettering with author, title, and original year of publication.
It looks like the swedish chef was dictating!
