I'll second Evan's observation. I've downloaded books in the collection that were added in the last year (not ASCII scans from the early 2000s) which were scanned and proofed by volunteers that were full of scannos and repetitive errors, had headers mixed in with the text, were missing chapter headings and much more. The vast majority of books I download done by the outsourcers are well done. If I find one that isn't, I submit a quality report, just like I do when I find one with errors that was done by a volunteer. But I don't think outsourcers are "getting away" with anything.
Judy s. EVAN REESE wrote:
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 chaptersthe 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
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