- Report: #545256
Complaint Review: General Books LLC - Internet
Reported By:
Bill -
Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
Submitted:
Updated:
-
Author Not Confirmed
Why?
General Books LLC
Internet, United States of America
Phone:
Web:
www.general-books.net
Categories:
Business Rating:
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General Books LLC poor product quality and questionable business methods Internet
A preface: I believe publishing companies are important businesses that should not be treated roughly in any way. Books are important resources that should be respected and shared.
With that said, I received for Christmas a copy of Thomas Carlyle's "The French Revolution" published by General Books LLC from my wife. I was shocked by the absolute lack of editing:
- Chapters starting and stopping in the middle of sentences.
- Weird and profuse use of unusual punctuation like |~ and ^ throughout the work.
- Citations appearing in the middle of paragraphs without any structure.
- Prolific misspellings throughout the work to the point of it being unreadable.
All in all, an unreadable version of a great work. I suspected a translation electronically to Japanese and back, until I read this in tiny print on the front page:
"We have recreated this book from the original using optical recognition software to keep the cost of the book as low as possible. Therefore, could you please forgive any spelling mistakes from smudged or missing pages? If in doubt, please refer to the .pdf file on our site."
So basically this company is either A. buying books, scanning them with a scanner, and then running them through what appears to be Microsoft office's OCR tech (which I have used myself with extremely poor results) or B. downloading .PDFs off line and publishing them. As a lover of books, I can tell you that th
Do not buy books published from this publisher. You can identify them by their empty covers which have a tan base, and black lettering with author, title, and original year of publication.
It looks like the swedish chef was dictating!
2 Updates & Rebuttals
Bill
United States of AmericaCounter Rebuttal
#2Author of original report
Fri, January 22, 2010
Firstly, the quality is so extremely poor that I would recommend you un-automate your editing process.
Secondly, "keeping costs low" is horsecrap, because I can buy modern trade paperbacks at the price you offer....13-14 dollars per book. I can go on google books and do what you did for 25 cents. Stealing out of print books offline, scanning them, feeding them through a crap process and not editing them is a complete money making scam. I know what that paperback cost to print...
And as far as offering to make a "perfect" book for me, why bother when I can just buy a competently edited edition from another source?
As a lover of out of print books, I think what your doing is ridiculous, and if I could insert a page from one of your books where the only characters are []][ \ \ ][ 1 21!!! then I would.
Cutting costs isnt an excuse for destroying a works quality and soul.
General Books
United States of AmericaGet a free copy of the book and a free membership in our book club
#3UPDATE Employee
Thu, January 21, 2010
By way of explanation, we provide the following information to book buyers on our website and provide similar information in our books and in the descriptions we provide book sellers:
We made this book exclusively for you using patented Print on Demand technology.
First we scanned the original rare book using a robot which automatically flipped and photographed each page.
We automated the typing, proof reading and design of this book using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software on the scanned copy. That let us keep your cost as low as possible.
If a book is very old, worn and the type is faded, this can result in typos or missing text. This is also why our books don't have illustrations; the OCR software can't distinguish between an illustration and a smudge.
We understand how annoying typos, missing text or illustrations, foot notes in the text or an index that doesn't work, can be. That's why we provide a free digital copy of most books exactly as they were originally published. And we provide a free trial membership in our book club so you can get free copies of other editions or related books.
OCR is not a perfect solution but we feel it's more important to make books available for a low price than not at all. So we warn readers on our website and in the descriptions we provide to book sellers that our books don't have illustrations and may have numerous typos or missing text. We also provide excerpts from books to book sellers and on our website so you can preview the quality of the book before buying it.
If you would prefer that we manually type, proof read and design your book so that it's perfect, simply contact us for the cost. Since many of our books only sell one or two copies a year, unlike the other books you have bought, we have to split the production costs between those one or two buyers.
To take us up on our offer of a free copy of the original rare book and a free membership in our book club simply visit our website at www.general-books.net and click on the contact us link.
