Owing to my careless in reading an account of what was and wasn't in a book, I decided to order yet another book. This was a hundred or more years out of print, having been assimilated into later versions of a predecessor. But it was my impression that a university press offered it still. I did not recognize the name of the publisher when a clerk at the local bookstore looked it up, but I ordered the book even so.
It arrived last week. I had a look on Friday, and found it to have been reproduced from bad photocopies. The machine used apparently had a flat platen, and in much of the book anything from a letter to a word or two is missing on the inner margin of the page--sometimes obscured by shadow, sometimes just not there. I declined to take it. After the second call from the bookstore, I decided that the store should not suffer for my stupidity, and I bought it. I will recycle it, I think. Donating it to Carpe Librum might lead to some unfortunate buyer getting mostly frustration for his $5.
Enthusiasts for the abolition of copyright sometimes seem to imagine the body of literature to exist in a digital, marked-up format. That is so for some works, for a few because they were produced that way, as with much government product, for others, such as one finds at the Gutenberg project, because dedicated volunteers have worked hard to enter, prepare, and check the works. But all of this is hard work, done for love, or for decent money. Too many of the publishers of works out of copyright are happy to pay minimally to have a work scanned, then print it on demand, without anyone having checked the work.. Nobody could have checked this work and imagined it readable.
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