[bksvol-discuss] Re: Making of the Atomic Bomb

  • From: Cindy <cindyr@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2007 01:52:27 -0800

Misha,

Congratulations on carefully completing a long at times difficult book.  I'm glad you found it interesting. That makes working on long books a pleaure, at least so I've found. I've found, having done several, that as long as I'm finding the reading interesting I don't mind the length or the fixing of scannos--and I have done the find and replace just is case I might miss to problem in my reading if I get tired, or to save me the troble when I get to the word. But, like you, after finishing such a book, even though I've enjoyed it, I want something a little shorter and less weighty for my next project.

Grandma Cindy


-----Original Message-----
From: mlsestak@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thu, 8 Nov 2007 21:32:17 -0800 (PST)
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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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