eBOOK CRITICS:  JUDGING AN eBOOK BY ITS COVER


The vast majority of Project Gutenberg's critics aren't judging
the eBooks themselves, but rather on what is literally material
that usually is presented on or near the cover of paper books--
and the general appearance of the eBook on their screens, which
is, sadly to say, their choice, not Project Gutenberg's.


Here is a list of the most common criticisms:

Color
Font
Margination
Pagination
Catalog Data

Cover Art [This from a few years ago, not a current item]



Those Who Complain The Loudest Never Seem To Read The Books:


Interestingly enough, the people who complain the loudest will
usually be those who have the least to say about the contents,
usually giving no indication that they have actually READ some
particular eBook or collection they are complaining about.

We have made a great effort to make Project Gutenberg's eBooks
work well with the widest variety of hardware and software and
thus often do not include end-of-line hyphenation, pagination,
or page numbers, as these can and do upset the reading process
of both human beings and computer programs.

It is very important to us that search programs be able to get
to the quotations you want to find, that our eBooks contain an
entirely minimal number of strange characters that might upset
the ability to search or cut and paste into emails, into those
wide variety of word processors out there, etc.

Even more important to the visually challenged, is the ability
to either read aloud from eBooks or to adjust the font size or
shape to suit those readers.

Thus we do as little as possible to force such formalities and
styles onto our readers.


Form and Formality versus Content:


99% of the complaints are about how the books LOOK rather than
what is in the contents of the eBooks.



The Choice Is Yours:

 These Are YOUR Choices, NOT Made For You By Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg has gone out of its way to insure that eBooks
are readable in nearly any combination of hardware and software
people are likely to encounter, and to leave the choice of font
and color selection up to the reader, yet the most common facts
commented upon by many eBook readers is that they prefer how an
eBook appears on a certain combination of hardware and software
other than the defaults that are installed on their computers.

Anyone who is willing to take a few minutes to set their colors
and fonts to their own choices will have all these eBooks in an
infinite, or close to it, variety.

For those who do not choose, it is rather like riding a bicycle
without ever shifting the gears.

Today it is difficult to buy a computer with less than millions
and millions of colors, presuming only one million are suitable
for the foreground color, and only one million for backgrounds,
that leaves a trillion possible color combination even allowing
for eliminating nearly all the choices before you even start.

I have no idea how many fonts are available today that come for
free with computers, but I do know that you can buy more for an
entirely nominal price, usually by the hundreds or thousands.


Setting your own choice of margins and page length is trivial--
you can do it in a variety of ways.



What An eBook Should Or Should Not Be:


Many people believe that an eBook should be nothing more than a
Xerox of their own favorite paper edition, and that all edition
choices other than their own personal favorite should never see
the light of day, at least as far as eBook editions go.  Such a
narrow-minded approach is probably reminiscent of the comments,
hundreds and thousands of years ago, about the changes from the
written manuscripts before The Gutenberg Press, 500+ years back,
and the change from scrolls to bound books 1,000 years ago.

The truth is that most of the classics were written in formats,
and styles, that look nothing like what we see when we read the
same content today.


What Is A Book?

A book is usually a collection of words by a certain person who
felt a need to communicate certain thoughts and feelings to the
rest of the world.  Modern books sometimes contain illustration
pages that would only have been available as woodcuts earlier--
and the most modern books might include "multimedia" materials.

When we read the classics, and most of the Project Gutenberg is
made up of classics and their contemporaries, we are not really
reading anything that resembles the original work, which is not
unlikely to have been written with a quill pen, or even earlier
writing implements.

Nevertheless, these "purists" give the impression that classics
were all written originally in English, in book form, and these
books should never be changed with respect to appearance and to
content, even to the point of preserving the obvious errors.

Sorry, but I'm just not willing to spend my life preserving the
errors of previous generations of publishers who copied by hand
up until The Gutenberg Press, in a wide variety of translations
that have often gone through various iterations of the game our
parties used to play, called "telephone," where we found out an
enormous amount of what happens when one person tells another--
then that person tells another, etc.  You can be sure that what
we read as the Greek Classics have often gone through just such
a process, right down to such obvious errors as:

The Red Sea

versus

The Reed Sea

and

Thou Shalt Not Kill

versus

Thou Shalt Not Commit Murder


As I said back in the days when we first started Shakespeare on
Project Gutenberg, I am not going to get involved in discussion
after discussion about whether it should be:

To be or not to be

or

To be, or not to be

or

To be; or not to be

or

To be: or not to be

or

To be- or not to be

or

To be--or not to be

or something else.

This is of no interest to 99% of the readers.

Personally, I doubt if there are even .000001% of the world in
which there is even the chance of such a question arising when
reading Shakespeare.

The truth is that, other than perhaps The First Folio:  which,
as many have pointed out, sometimes goes out of its way for an
opportunity to be obscure, you can get 99% of what Shakespeare
is all about by reading nearly any edition, and Shakespeare is
one of the rare cases when the editions have differences in an
obvious manner.

Most different editions of the same book are 99.99% the same--
and those differences are usually just obvious errors, or some
comments that have been added, but not really a change in word
choices, punctuation choices, etc., by the original author.

Yet the "purists" will spend untold portions of their careers,
such as they are, arguing about not only if Shakespeare wrote,
or did not write, a certain punctuation mark, much less if the
author of what we call "Shakespeare" was really Shakespeare.

I recall a specific example where one of the most famous of an
elite corps of universities once commissioned an entire year's
salary to count how many times Shakespeare used the word "the"
in his works. . .this in a era when there were already eBooks,
and probably more than one of each Shakespeare play, that made
counting the word "the" something that could have been done in
no time at all, even if several different counting programs of
different manufacturers were used to get varied results.

The truth is that such a project could easily have been done--
and done within a very high degree of confidence--by students,
or anyone else, for that matter, without the attentions of the
faculty professors at the very highest level at the quite very
most elite university on the entire planet.

Did someone really think this was worth an entire years' pay?

Or was this some kind of elitist intellectual snobbery?

That's what we get lots of time as Project Gutenberg critics--
elitist intellectual snobbery--of the kind that says without a
certain pedigree from The British or American Kennel Club, the
value of an eBook is absolutely nothing, unless and until this
pedigreed information is included.

However, once you start correcting errors, and I am unwilling,
as stated much earlier, to engage in the error preservation, a
simple identification with just one paper edition is a lie and
I am not willing to lie, either.

I leave it to the ivory tower types to argue about how many of
what kind of angels can sit or stand or dance on a pinhead and
then I leave it to the pinhead to figure out what to do with a
band of angels on their heads.

Personally, I recommend Selsun Blue or Head And Shoulders.



Conclusion:


My apologies for spending so much time on this, but truly, the
complaints are mostly all of such natures as described above.

These arguments are interminable, from the points of view of a
person who says the books must include Dewey Decimal System in
the header to those saying it must include Library of Congress
to those who say it must the Union Cataloguing to those saying
it must be some other system of cataloging.

The truth is that many of these books, perhaps even most, came
without any such information included, not even a date, as the
United States was the only country to require a date and it is
no longer requiring it, just to make knowing when copyright is
expired just all that harder to figure out.  Copyright is more
of a topic than I want to get into here, let me just say go to
my articles about copyright to find out that copyright was the
invention of those who wanted to stop The Gutenberg Press, and
each subsequent publishing technology, that would/could/should
have brought libraries of information to the commons.

My strongest suggestion on these matters is simply to remember
to forget the ivory tower argumentation that is designed with,
sadly to say, nothing more than a pretension to keep libraries
of eBooks away from the commons and the commoners, and to keep
information close to the vest of "the vested interests."

You can get 99% of the information from 99% of the editions of
nearly any book in the whole world, with the exception, of the
most conspicuous of these "purists," those who would abridge--
Bowdlerize--or burn what they don't want you to read.

Remember, people died for your right to read the public domain
books of the world, starting with the breaking of the monopoly
over religious works that created The Protestant Reformations,
right down to those who are still alive today after fighting a 
World War to take down the book burners.

"Where They Burn Books, They Will, Eventually, Burn People."

If those who want permanent copyright had their way, you would
not even be able to look up the source of that quotation.