One thing not noted in the big announcement that Google is offering their books in epub: used to be Google gave us the choice of pdf or txt. Now txt is gone, replaced by epub. But the epub, unlike the txt, is readable only on a few programs, and how many of those programs let you correct the bad OCR?

I pulled down Hilaire Belloc’s 1902 edition of ‘The Path to Rome’ to check. As this was featured on the Google Books home page, I reckoned this might be an edition they could be proud of. Not so.

Every page header was included, and the pages didn’t break according to the original. Some page headers were separate paragraphs, others were set inline into other paragraphs. In all, a terrible reading experience.

If I were a teacher trying to save my students some case, could I recommend this epub edition? Not at all. The pdf version not only escapes all these problems, it also gives teacher and students the same page number references for in-class study. The big problem with the pdf, of course, is it’s impossible to read on a small pda- or smartphone-screen.

Setting all the Google public-domain books into some sort of wiki and allowing readers to correct them would go a long, long way to rectifying all the epub drawbacks, and actually making the books useful.