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“It takes a bit of work to make a decent ebook. I’ve been overseeing the conversion of the Pyr backlist for two months now, so I know. I’ve also bought about 15 ebooks in the last two weeks on iBooks, and I’m sorry to say that I wish a few of the publishers whose books I’ve bought had taken a little more time with the conversion process. In one sad case, every single first letter of the first word on every line of the contents page is omitted. In another, every instance of the word “pilot” has been rendered as “pi lot,” where about a quarter of all apostrophes are rendered as dashes. A third omits all interior illustrations though the cover and front matter proclaims “illustrated by…”. “
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I’m in the slow process of converting my accumulated library of papers into an electronic format, mainly by downloading electronic versions, and I’ve noticed some of these same issues in the PDF versions, particularly where paper copies were scanned. Of course, the publishers felt compelled to rush the job of putting their back libraries on line. Some recurring errors that I have noticed:
-Spacing between words gets messed up. Often words will run together (LikeThis) and sometimes even get merged together (LikTehis). At other times the space gets turned into a tab.
-Colons generally get converted into apostrophes. Scientific paper titles are much more likely than average prose to use colons.
-Accented characters get mangled. A significant headache in the science world since many European names include accented characters; particularly in my field since such a name (Alfvén) commonly appears in paper titles. Taking é as an example: sometimes the character is omitted, sometimes the letter and accent mark get separated (e’), and sometimes it gets morphed into another character entirely (6).
Of course, this is with a publisher that at least bothered to use OCR software, however flawed, in its scans. In some cases the PDF is nothing but images of the pages.