Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Google's One Million eBooks Of Crap!

Today Google cut itself loose from the exclusive arrangement it had with Sony to offer one million free ePub-formatted eBooks.

This is not something Google should brag about. The eBooks are utter crap!

Exhibit One, the original image scan:


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Exhibit Two, the ePub text:


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A typo right at the start. And it gets worse! There are typos throughout and paragraphs are even broken up too!

Exhibit Three, the Table of Contents is just an image scan with no links:


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I really don't know why I expected this to be worthwhile. I've been down this road before: Google Book Search Goes Mobile: Teh Suckage

Now all you Google Book Settlement supporters: How about considering that this is what will happen to the millions and millions of Settlement books too!

For those who are technically minded, here are two screensnaps of the underlying XML:


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