Badly produced e-books

This blog entry struck a chord with me - free books are all very well, but the quality control can be absolutely awful.  Fine, if you are stuck on a plane for several hours, but certainly destructive of reading pleasure when the typos mean that you have to keep guessing what the author was saying.

The fact that Google Books can produce such rubbish is particularly depressing - isn't their motto something like, "Never do harm"?  I suppose that harming a text doesn't really count in their book.  [Sorry about the pun!]

Google Books again

The ongoing debate about Google Books made it into the Observer yesterday. It picked up on Robert Darnton's argument that because books are our common heritage, their control ought not to be in the hands of a commercial organization.

Google's response to this really could be pretty straightforward: simply establish a not-for-profit "Google Foundation" and put access to Google Books under the Foundation.

But, you say, Google makes money from ads on the Google Books pages, so how would that work? Well, it could still work, all that would have to happen is for Google to pay into the Google Foundation some proportion of the ad revenue gained from Google Books and everyone would be happy. Since Google's unofficial motto is 'don't do evil' a solution like this would demonstrate, clearly, the desire to do good.