"The Terrible Price of Free: On E-reading Jane Austen via Google’s Ebooks"

Joe Esposito, the author of The Scholarly Kitchen blog post, is a well known consultant in the world of digital publishing. At one time he was the CEO of Encylopaedia Britannica.
This is must read material that’s also worth sharing and discussing with colleagues. In fact, several of the topics discussed in the article might make for worthwhile session(s) at a conference.
Here’s one paragraph from the blog post:

Rather than pay for the Penguin or any other edited version of Austen, I decided to be a cheapskate and searched for free Google versions. And that’s when things began to go wrong. The Google editions were packed with errors. If I were not studying Google Ebooks for professional reasons, if I were not already familiar with the works of Austen, would I have gone on? Would I have thought that Austen does not know how to place quotation marks, that she made grammatical mistakes that would embarrass even a high school freshman, or that her dialogue sometimes breaks off without explanation? I began to wonder what service or disservice Google had performed, rendering one of the world’s most popular writers in a form as bizarre as the Zemblan translation of Shakespeare in Nabokov’s “Pale Fire.”

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