Interestingly, we were bought out by a competitor, which actually took hard copies of the documents and scanned and OCRed them. When their content began to be incorporated into ours, I noticed a lot of OCR errors (my favorite being “World War Ill”–that’s capital i, and two lower-case ls; a word synonymous with “sick.”). The Powers That Be were shocked, shocked! to learn that there were OCR errors in their content.

Ours was cleaner, because A. we started with electronic text (which of course is not possible with old books) and B. there was a sentient human being checking that it wasn’t junk. Computers are great for the heavy lifting but we primates haven’t yet made ourselves totally obsolete. And I’ve never worked with an OCRed text that was 100% clean.

OCRed PDF and DjVu files from the Internet Archive with other OCR software aren’t proofread either, full of typos and unsuitable for e-book readers.

Only the Gutenberg books are proofread and correctly formatted, but their number is also several orders of magnitude below.

I generally go with the version that has the most downloads, but that may be just because it was the first out and because others are doing as I am.

Google’s behavior leaves me longing for the era when ebooks meant books done by Gutenberg, books legally copied and carefully proofed.

Imagine if Gmail had launched with comparable quality to the Gulliver OCR! Gmail never would have taken off.

This really is a tremendous black eye to Google’s reputation, and the widely-announced deal with Sony is only going to expose these warts and hurt Google even more.

Google really needs to fix this, fast.