[bksvol-discuss] Re: Making of the Atomic Bomb
- From: "Evan Reese" <mentat1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2007 21:42:47 -0800
This is excellent news. This is one of those books I feel I should have read
a long time ago but never did. I have read other books on the subject, but
still feel that I have missed something in not reading this one. I am
especially glad that it will be added to the collection after having been
validated so conscientiously. It really sounds like you did the book proud
and future readers will benefit from your work and the work of the
submitter. I know I will be one of those readers.
Thanks much.
Evan
----- Original Message -----
From: Michael Sestak
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2007 9:32 PM
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Making of the Atomic Bomb
I just finished validating, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb," by Richard
Rhodes. This is Pulitzer prize winning book about the people, history and
science involved in the development of the first atomic bombs. It is very
well written and I hope it is in the collection soon.
Aside from advertising the book, there are some things I'd like to mention
about validating it. Since this is a long book (800 pages plus
bibliography, notes and index), there was ample opportunity for scanning
errors to creep in. This was actually an excellent scan. Very few common
scanning errors occurred and the large number of foreign names, places,
phrases as well as scientific terms were usually scanned correctly.
The worst problem was the occurrence of capital u in place of li ll and
il. Boy was it tedious getting rid of these since with three options for
errors plus valid capital u's to deal with, find and replace was only
slightly more useful than just reading along alert for them. Fortunately,
these errors tended to occur in clusters, so there would be many pages of
good text, a couple pages with capital u problems, then back to good text
and so on. The word protege complete with accents occurred more often than
I have seen it in any other book. Unfortunately, the accented e's were
often scanned as d's or 6's. At least that is unique enough for using find
and replace to be a snap.
Finally, this book has a rather unique feature. Instead of interrupting
the text with footnotes, the author just put a section of notes at the end
of the book. The notes consist of a page number followed by a short bit of
text from the page, followed by a citation to the source or a short bit of
additional information. So, if you are reading along and wonder "how did he
know that," you can go back to the notes, look for the page number, then see
if any of them are about the topic you are interested in. However, in the
book, these notes are in two columns. The submitter did a very good job of
scanning each column separately so it could be made into one column format.
But, for some of the pages, the page numbers from the second column were at
the end of the lines of the first column. This was so close to right that I
just had to move those numbers to the right lines. Fortunately,
paperbackswap had a copy of the book to compare to the bookshare file.
Though long and sometimes problematic to validate, I enjoyed this book and
would recommend it...but I think I'll validate a couple simple science
fiction books before taking on another monster like this.
Misha
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