Public domain titles are a tricky area for ebooks. On the one hand, a bit of digging can get you a free copy of a title easily. But paying a nominal amount sometimes means a better quality copy, with typos and other issues properly corrected. Unless, of course, you bought “War and Peace” for your NOOK.
According to Poynter, a company named “Superior Formatting Publishing” put out a copy of “War and Peace” for the Kindle. Then they made one for the NOOK. In a mind-boggling bit of sloppiness, they did an automatic search and replace every time “Kindle” appeared, replacing it with “NOOK”. Supposedly this was to make sure there were no references to the Kindle store anywhere, but what no one caught was that War and Peace contains the word “kindle” in the story.
This led to some entertaining and unintentional rewrites of “War and Peace”, as you can tell in the graphic up top.
Have you encountered any super bizarre typos in ebooks? Do you vet your public domain downloads carefully for errors? Have ebooks nook’d your love of reading? Let us know in the comments!