I am totally disgusted with the quality of some of the publisher
provided books I encountered yesterday. This isn't just a Bookshare
issue. These are the same versions of books that you pay for when you
buy an e-book version to read with a tablet or equivalent device.
I decided last night to read Rudyard Kipling's "Kim." Bookshare has
several publisher quality versions.
All but one have transcription errors, probably from publishers OCRing
old out-of-copyright versions.
The one that takes the cake, though: Two versions by Dover Publications,
one added to the collection just yesterday. The original text of Kim
includes words with characters that have diacritical marks. In the Dover
versions, each letter that is a diacritical mark is missing. In its
stead, the publisher inserted a graphic image of the letter. It's not
even readable if you're sighted because the images are blurry and twice
the size of the text surrounding it in each word.
I would complain via a book report, but in these instances where a
publisher provides a book with images for text, I've been told that it's
just the way it is.
How is THAT accessible, to have an image for alphabetic characters
within a words? Grrrr.
BTW, the only publisher quality version of Kim that's clean of errors
and the above sort of rubbish was provided by Random House. It is a
scholarly edition with footnotes. The footnotes are a bit of a tossup
for me. They're carefully done and in nice clear understandable
language, explaining important words and places that aren't obvious to a
non-British non-early-1900s reader. However, they also include
explanations that are editorial opinions presented as facts, which I
find distracting and annoying.
--
Judy s.
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