Now Google is offering free eBook downloads in ePub format for titles that are out of copyright. It sounds like a good idea in theory, but to create an ePub eBook, Google has had to use OCR on the original scans in order to extract the text.
Sadly, nobody at Google seems to have bothered to have checked the final version, making some texts impossible to understand. It seems to make a mockery of Google's statement that "Digitizing books allows us to provide more access to great literature for a wider set of the world's population".
[Snip]
Some of Google's other ePub books are better, including Treasure Island, but we still found that it was littered with mistakes and odd characters. Until Google decides it's going to check the text after it's been through the OCR process, Project Gutenberg remains the best destination for free eBooks.
Some of them have funny line breaks and weird typos like “vzen” instead of “when” and “i86f” instead of “1861.” There are other complications. You can’t search Google’s catalog explicitly when you’re in the mood for something free; on the other hand, those obscure Google texts clutter up your search results when you’re looking for a more current book.
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