Actually, volunteers and members do get away with it. You should have seen the copy of Dan Brown's Angels & Demons that I read that was added to the collection last March. This was not done by outsourcers. (I won't mention the names of the submitter and the proofreader since the book is gone now anyway.) I submitted a quality report on it and it was replaced, although I haven't looked at the replacement. Among the most egregious problems were: garbled headers at the tops of nearly all pages almost no chapter titles at the beginnings of chapters the first word of each chapter--or at the change of scene, it was not easy to be sure because of the missing chapter titles--was garbled random hard returns in the middles of paragraphs, often followed by the letter i. One of the things that really bugged me, although it did not appear too many times, was that the initials LHC, which stands for Large Hadron Collider, were rendered as the word the. This is certainly not an exhaustive list. I submitted the quality report several months ago and I don't have a copy of it. I'm sure that I've forgotten stuff I put in the report, and even that wasn't a page-by-page listing of all the errors. Clearly, the submitter just threw this book up onto the check out page with little, if any, cleanup; and it was obvious that the proofreader didn't even look at it. I'm not saying that outsourcers shouldn't be held to at least as high a standard as volunteers and members. Of course they should be. But it's not exactly fair to say the outsourcers are getting away with stuff that volunteers and members are not. Evan ----- Original Message ----- From: robert tweedy To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 12:10 PM Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Comments on Impulse by Ellen Hopkins Yep they should be. ----- Original Message ----- From: solsticesinger To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 9:49 AM Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Comments on Impulse by Ellen Hopkins No. We certainly don't get away with it, and we don't get paid. So, if they do get paid, shouldn't their work be held to the same, if not higher, standards? ----- Original Message ----- From: robert tweedy To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 6:37 AM Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Comments on Impulse by Ellen Hopkins We don't get away with it. ----- Original Message ----- From: solsticesinger To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 11:25 PM Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Comments on Impulse by Ellen Hopkins It isn't harsh, but is very, very fair. It was my thought, as I read through the book. If they're being paid, why is such sloppiness permitted? ----- Original Message ----- From: Christina To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 6:33 PM Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Comments on Impulse by Ellen Hopkins I don't understand why they don't. They're not volunteers, right? As far as I know, they get paid for their time and, if that's true, they should be held accountable for their work. I know that's harsh but I think it's also fair. Christina ----- Original Message ----- From: EVAN REESE To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:36 PM Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Comments on Impulse by Ellen Hopkins Nah, they don't read through their scans. I've mentioned here before that there was evidence to show that they didn't, and this just adds to it. Evan ----- Original Message ----- From: solsticesinger To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 3:58 PM Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Comments on Impulse by Ellen Hopkins I just finished reading Impulse by Ellen Hopkins, which was added to the collection by an outsourcing group in Africa. This is one of the worst outsourced scans I've seen. In fact, I wonder if anyone bothered to proof it at all. The book switched point of view often, and there was no indication of this in the scan. Therefore, it was impossible to know which character was speaking at any given time. In fact, due to the lack of headers, it was impossible to determine how many narrators even existed. I saw several very common scanning errors that could have been fixed, if only the book had been read through. "hail" for "hall" is an example. I really looked forward to reading this book, but was sorely disappointed by the scan. It really does need to be redone, IMO.