Google Books
So much for quality control.
I downloaded the 1743 edition of Cotton’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays from Google Books last night and found yet another instance of badly flawed copying from the University of Michigan. About thirty pages are missing from Volume I; about ten from Volume II; and three or four from Volume III. In Vol. II, a lot of pages are cut off at the top so that the page number or some text is missing. The first two volumes have quite a lot of colour images which frequently include the fingers of the copyist.
Of the other editions I have, the 1711 is from Oxford, but the 1759 edition is also from Michigan. Volume I has a few missing and decapitated pages. Volume II starts well enough, but there are a lot of errors in the final 250 pages. Volume III has only trivial flaws relating to the margins of the pages.
The problem is that there appears to be no way of informing Google about these problems. It’s possible to report illegible text, but not poorly done copying and certainly not missing pages whose text is illegible by its absence. It seems that no one either at the University of Michigan or at Google even bothered checking the quality of the copying, which, if it’s being left to the punters and the pundits to check, ought to be more easy to report when it’s fallen short of a decent standard.
I suspect that the copyist got bored with the job and thought he could get away with producing an inferior reproduction probably because he believed that no one would ever look at the book. I’m not surprised. I once spent a whole day photocopying someone’s manuscript which, being typewritten on very thin paper, couldn’t be put through the feeder.
So, if I can’t inform Google about this problem, would it be of any use informing the University of Michigan? Whose problem is it? Google’s or theirs? Would the initiative have to come from Google, who don’t even offer the option of reporting naff repros as far as I can discover? I might do a little more investigating, although I doubt whether I’ll find any answers.
I downloaded the 1743 edition of Cotton’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays from Google Books last night and found yet another instance of badly flawed copying from the University of Michigan. About thirty pages are missing from Volume I; about ten from Volume II; and three or four from Volume III. In Vol. II, a lot of pages are cut off at the top so that the page number or some text is missing. The first two volumes have quite a lot of colour images which frequently include the fingers of the copyist.
Of the other editions I have, the 1711 is from Oxford, but the 1759 edition is also from Michigan. Volume I has a few missing and decapitated pages. Volume II starts well enough, but there are a lot of errors in the final 250 pages. Volume III has only trivial flaws relating to the margins of the pages.
The problem is that there appears to be no way of informing Google about these problems. It’s possible to report illegible text, but not poorly done copying and certainly not missing pages whose text is illegible by its absence. It seems that no one either at the University of Michigan or at Google even bothered checking the quality of the copying, which, if it’s being left to the punters and the pundits to check, ought to be more easy to report when it’s fallen short of a decent standard.
I suspect that the copyist got bored with the job and thought he could get away with producing an inferior reproduction probably because he believed that no one would ever look at the book. I’m not surprised. I once spent a whole day photocopying someone’s manuscript which, being typewritten on very thin paper, couldn’t be put through the feeder.
So, if I can’t inform Google about this problem, would it be of any use informing the University of Michigan? Whose problem is it? Google’s or theirs? Would the initiative have to come from Google, who don’t even offer the option of reporting naff repros as far as I can discover? I might do a little more investigating, although I doubt whether I’ll find any answers.
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