Book People Archive

Re: feedback to umichigan on "books and culture", part 7

Bowerbird wrote:

[snip]

>>   suggestion9:  find a way to incorporate corrections by end-users.
> 
> that last one should be fairly obvious.  i've got a perfect text  now.


Guess again. There's at least one error on almost every page. The 
original book's running heads have a period at the end. Those periods 
are missing from the running heads in your version. For example, look 
at your favorite page, 123:

http://www.greatamericannovel.com/mabie/mabiep123.html

In the scan, you can see that the running head is

           Liberation through Ideas.

The period is missing from your text. But it's present on the 
University of Michigans's copy of that page:

http://mdp.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mdp/pt?view=text&size=100&id=39015016881628&seq=129

Wouldn't you have pointed it out if all of those periods had been 
missing from the OCR at UMich? :)

Now, since your post talks about formatting, let's take a look at some 
formatting flaws in your version. Let's take a look at page 104:

http://www.greatamericannovel.com/mabie/mabiep104.html

In the scan, we can see that there's a lengthy block quotation on that 
page. It's set in smaller type, and, unlike a typical HTML blockquote, 
the left and right margins are the same as the main text's. But in 
your HTML version of that page, that quoted section is in the same 
size font as the main text, and it isn't formatted as a typical HTML 
blockquote either. Instead, each line in that section has a "/tab\" in 
front of it. (There's also a "@[redacted] at the end of the lines ending with a 
hyphen.) Is that your idea of formatting a blockquote in an HTML file? ;)

Later on in your post, you wrote:


> and z.m.l. can easily be transformed to .pdf and .html, which is 
> what you seeing when you look at the mabie book on the web:
>> >   http://www.greatamericannovel.com/mabie/mabiep001.html
> 
> (and then, of course, the .html version can also be converted to
> a wide variety of other formats, for handhelds, like plucker or
> ms-lit, being that .html is now the "rosetta stone" of formats.)


Would the blockquotes in the book be formatted correctly in those 
other file formats, or would they also only have a "/tab\" at the 
beginning of each line? ;) I should warn you that the only way you 
could make a PDF that reproduced the original line breaks--with 
justified text and uniform left and right margins--would be to set 
those quoted sections in a smaller font, just like the original book 
and just like my PDF digital reprint.

Now, if we look at the next page in your demo, page 105

http://www.greatamericannovel.com/mabie/mabiep105.html

we not only see a lot more lines beginning with "/tab\" but also 
another formatting error. In the 3rd line from the bottom of the page, 
you'll see the name "Kourotrophos." It's italicized in the scan, but 
it isn't in your HTML version. That really surprised me, because you 
told us when you first put up your demo that you'd used my text. As 
anyone who has downloaded either my HTML or PDF versions can see, the 
word is italicized in my ebooks.

There are a few other errors, but since I'm in a hurry to finish this 
post before our moderator leaves for his vacation, I won't go into 
them now.


Best wishes to everyone for the New Year!

Jose Menendez

[Moderator: Unfortunately, I was already out the door by the time this
 came in on Dec. 22, but here it is now.  It will be in the archive for 2006
 along with the post it's replying to, though (and it and earlier
 bits of the thread may also end up near the top of the new 2007 archive
 page when that's created, if the thread continues to be active into
 the new year.)

 Happy new year, all! - JMO]