I don't doubt that things may have gone wrong in some instances. But I didn't notice any such errors in the few works on freekindlebooks.org that I quickly looked through, so I can't evaluate what exactly might have caused the problem or how it might, if possible, be corrected. Are there particular instances you might be able to point me to? Regards, Mark
In the vast majority of PG works, probably between 98 and 100 percent of quotation marks and apostrophes could be reliably corrected without the need for human eyeballing.
www.freekindlebooks.org has a large number of books that were "98% to 100%" "corrected" from straights to curlys "automatically."
You can judge for yourself whether this is a good thing or not -- when "automatic" algorithms go bad -- and they will go bad -- the results can be very ugly.
[freekindlebooks.org predates that point in time when PG offered real ebooks -- in fact the whole point of freekindlebooks.org was to try to shame PG into offering real ebooks.]