On 10/14/2011 12:35 AM, Jim Adcock wrote:
The PG website lists the most downloaded books first. If people don't download your `better proofed, better illustrated´ version, then there is something wrong with it.
It takes a pretty sophisticated user of PG, like probably someone who has actually created books for PG, to understand that a more recent version, and therefore one that has been downloaded LESS, is probably going to be the better quality effort for people to read.
It takes a user sophisticated enough to click on a link that says "sort by release date".
Why yes, there IS something "wrong" with that "better proofed, better illustrated" version: namely that PG continues to denigrate that new version and continues to "advertise" the old defective version. This is a self-defeating strategy: PG says it wants volunteers to rework the old and crufty versions -- but then makes sure that almost no customer actually reads these newly decrufted versions!
A new edition on PG has to face the same challenges as every product that enters an already saturated market. If your edition is better by a significant margin it will rise to the top eventually. The contention here is that often new editions are better only in the narcissistic POV of the producer. A few missed spelling errors in an old edition don't hurt anybody, but an ebook that doesn't display right on your device of choice because of misguided markup decisions hurts a lot. I am a sophisticated enough reader and I often download all editions of a book to many devices and *more times than not* the older ones look better on my Kindle or Nexus. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org