Waterstones Ebook Quality

[Gomoto]

What are your comments on the Waterstones Ebook Quality

I bought my first book, Sniper One, from Waterstones recently and misspelling (perhaps ORC related?) seems to be quite a problem.

I redownloaded and doublechecked in Adobe DE, same misspelling.

Example: 20/367 vHlage (village)
(Would be nice if somebody could verify this error)

Regards
Gomoto

[wchris]

I have purchase 4 books which have been fine

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Gomoto

What are your comments on the Waterstones Ebook Quality

I bought my first book, Sniper One, from Waterstones recently and misspelling (perhaps ORC related?) seems to be quite a problem.

I redownloaded and doublechecked in Adobe DE, same misspelling.

Example: 20/367 vHlage (village)
(Would be nice if somebody could verify this error)

Regards
Gomoto

Typical OCR error. Many eBooks are created by scanning and using OCR on the printed version of the book. Nothing to do with Waterstones - it's the publisher's fault.

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Typical OCR error. Many eBooks are created by scanning and using OCR on the printed version of the book. Nothing to do with Waterstones - it's the publisher's fault.

And in my opinion at least they'll keep on doing it unless we complain and return the book every time. If we don't take action we condone their shoddy work, and deserve what we get.

regards, Alex

[PieOPah]

I have bought several books from Waterstones and in each instance have had no problems. There has been the occasional typo or error, but no more than you see in physical books.

[lawrie]

I bought a Ken Follet (The Pillars of the Earth ) book from WHSmiths and it had on average one misspelling a page.
These were from faulty OCR. For example, 'I'll' was always 'TH'
It was obvious that no human had read the book in e format.

I contacted the publishers (Pan Macmillan) who simply referred me to Smiths.

Smith's initial response was they had had a look at it and could not find any mistakes.

I sent an annoted list of mistakes from one chapter and they replied with thanks and a refund.

What worries me is that these books are cheap to produce, fail to meet basic quality control at times, yet still cost as much.

[thibaulthalpern]

Originally Posted by lawrie

What worries me is that these books are cheap to produce, fail to meet basic quality control at times, yet still cost as much.

I don't know if it's just as cheap to produce but they certainly cost just about as much and actually sometimes quite a bit more! For one academic book, I can buy a new paperback version for US$30 but the ebook version is...guess what....US$99! Yes!

Luckily for me though, I haven't seen errors in academic ebooks. Perhaps quality control for academic publishers is a high priority for academic presses. And generally, I don't buy non-academic digital books because I only read them once. I borrow them from the library.

[Gomoto]

Update:

Waterstone handled the problems with my first ebook purchase professionally. This and the positve feedbacks from fellow forum members allow me to look forward to other waterstones ebook offerings.

I am quite happy about this result, because over here in germany, there is only a very limited list of english ebooks available from the local sellers.

P.S. my second waterstones purchase is a contender regarding ebook quality (no ORC errors, pleasing chapter heading design)