Pride and Prejudice [Kindle Edition]

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Pride and Prejudice [Kindle Edition]

By : Jane Austen
List Price : ~~$0.00~~
Price : $0.00

Customer Reviews

Jane Austen is one of the great masters of the English language, and PRIDE AND PREJUDICE is her great masterpiece, a sharp and witty comedy of manners played out in early 19th Century English society, a world in which men held virtually all the power and women were required to negotiate mine-fields of social status, respectability, wealth, love, and sex in order to marry both to their own liking and to the advantage of their family. And such is particularly the case of the Bennetts, a family of daughters whose father's estate is entailed to a distant relative, for upon Mr. Bennett's death they will lose home, land, income, everything. But are the Bennett daughters up to playing a winning hand in this high-stakes matrimonial game without forfeiting their own personal integrity?
This battle of the sexes is largely seen through the eyes of second daughter Elizabeth, who possesses a razor-sharp wit and rich sense of humor--and who finds herself hindered by her own addlepated mother, her sister Jane's hopeless love for the wealthy Mr. Bingley, and her sister Lydia's penchant for scandal... not to mention the high-born, formidable, and outrageously proud Mr. Darcy, who seems determined to trump her every card. But the game of love proves more surprising than either Elizabeth or Mr. Darcy can imagine, and sometimes a seemingly weak hand proves a winning one when all cards are on the table.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE is simply one of the funniest novels ever written, peopled with memorable characters brought vividly to life as they both succeed and fail at the game of life according to the manners of their era. It is a novel to which I return again and again, enjoying Austen's brillant talent. I have little respect for people who describe it as dull, slow, out of date, for as long as men and women live and fall in love it will never be out of style, always be meaningful, and always be funny. A masterpiece of wit and style; a timeless novel for the ages.

One of the versions listed is published by "General Books LLC." Another reader complained about the tiny and almost unreadable font - you probably bought the version published by General Books LLC - and here's the reason.
General Books LLC is an imprint of VDM Publishing, (google them and take a look at the Wikipedia article on them) and they specialise in publishing books that are free of copyright without doing any editing or quality control. A few quotes from the publishers website will explain more:
"We created your book using OCR software that includes an automated spell check. Our OCR software is 99 percent accurate if the book is in good condition. However, with up to 3,500 characters per page, even one percent can be an annoying number of typos....
After we re-typeset and designed your book, the page numbers change so the old index and table of contents no longer work. Therefore, we usually remove them. Since many of our books only sell a couple of copies, manually creating a new index and table of contents could add more than a hundred dollars to the cover price....
Our OCR software can't distinguish between an illustration and a smudge or library stamp so it ignores everything except type. We would really like to manually scan and add the illustrations. But many of our books only sell a couple of copies....
We created your book using a robot who turned and photographed each page. Our robot is 99 percent accurate. But sometimes two pages stick together. And sometimes a page may even be missing from our copy of the book. We would really like to manually scan each page and buy multiple copies of each original. But many of our books only sell a couple of copies..... "
So what you're getting if you buy the version published by General Books LLC is a scanned in, unedited, low quality (and with an almost unreadable font from the sounds of it) unindexed / No table of contents book at a higher price than many of the good quality imprints available. Basically, VDM Publishing is flooding Amazon with these low quality prints (450,000 of them are listed now) and, unfortunately, many of them have the reviews associated with better quality imprints associated with them. The product description is insufficient for the buyer that's not aware of this publisher.
Totally unethical marketing.
A reader,Scott Hannigan has commented: "What you have given us is feedback - not a review. There is an appropriate forum for your complaints. You should delete it as it brings down the average score of a classic." In response, I have to say that Amazon does not provide a forum for complaints and has been remarkably resistant to taking on board criticism from many customers over the books published by General Books LLC. In addition, Amazon is the Printer of these POD books and makes a substantial cut from them. Sadly, given that the General Books LLC version is lumped in with other imprints from genuine publishers, there is no real way of making potential buyers aware of the problems with this particular version of the book without inflicting it on all the other versions available. C'est la vie.
Scott - apologies for replying like this but Amazon removed my ability to comment some time ago - I broke ze commenting guidelines. Re "Amazon does provide a feedback section. You will find it under 'My Account', 'Personalization', 'Leave Seller Feedback'" - yes, they do indeed but the response to myself and many others has been uniformly that it's not their problem. Look up the discussion forum on Alphascript Books for a very enlightening backgrounder on this one. That said, if you bought a book from General Books LLC and saw what it was like, you'd be highly annoyed - as most buyers have been - and even if you returned it to Amazon for a refund, you'd be out of pocket for the postage.