Wonderful novel, poor edition
341545
Gertrudis G&oacute;mez de Avellaneda was a very talented "feminist" writer in the 19th Century. This is not her most popular novel, but it is still astounding that not many people know about it. It is a wonderful tale of the Conquest of Mexico that encompasses many different points of view. It is not only Hern&aacute;n Cort&eacute;s' story. It is everyone's story, including the 3 emperors and their families. The history is told in a way that the reader becomes attached to the characters. The history now has meaning because it is a narrative and not just cold, hard facts.  This particular edition has many typos and errors in punctuation. There are no paragraph indentations or breaks. Each new paragraph just begins on a new line, left alignment. The edition was poor but the novel itself is amazing!
2634914
This is a very informative, interesting look at human history. Well worth the read! However, the text relies on several tables and illustrations which are either formatted poorly in the Kindle edition, or not in it at all. Amazon needs to pressure the publisher to fix this. It's a great book, and it deserves better formatting.
2553631
James Lileks' first novel is entertaining, funny, sad and occasionally touching by turns, well worth reading. Unfortunately the Kindle edition is undermined by entire squadrons of typos, randomly placed line breaks that make dialogue a chore to follow, and paragraphing that several times made it necessary to flip back and forth between pages to figure out what in the Nine Hells was going on. I sincerely hope this gets cleaned up, because it really detracts from enjoying the story and makes me worry about the e-book releases he plans to release in the future.
2273450
I would have given this book five stars because the book itself is wonderful. But I gave it four because this particular edition by Theophania Publishing had so many typos it was ridiculous. Fore the most part it's easy to tell what the text is supposed to say, but there were a few spots were the typos marred the text, leaving one to guess at what it was supposed to say.
The actual "Life of Apollonius of Tyana" is really wonderful. History and legend are blended so beautifully that it is sometimes hard to tell which is which. I bought the book because I had heard that the Jesus story of the gospels was actually based on stories of Apollonius. After getting a little over half way through I noticed a few events that were similar to the gospels but I couldn't see the overall connection. At that time I went back through some of the gospels (which I hadn't read for a long time) and it hit me that the gospels sounding like they were abridged versions of Apollonius' biography just with a different ending.
Anyone looking to compare Apollonius with Jesus has to read this book.
1509148
I've read both of these books before, so I won't bore you with details on the characters, plots, etc.

This is a BEAUTIFUL book.  The binding is fantastic, the pages are crisp and clean and I love the little ribbon attached as a bookmark.  Really well constructed and sturdy - I expect it to last a lifetime.

However.  Ahem.

TYPOS??  Seriously?  Isn't anybody proofing these things?  In the 21st century, typos in a classic novel are simply inexcusable.
3080566
This is a wonderful story. I recommend the book, but not this Kindle edition.
This edition is so poorly transcribed that it's almost funny. While my granddaughter reads from the pocket book edition, I read from my Kindle which allows me to see immediately all the errors the Kindle edition has. Misspelling is the most common and frequent error with words such as: jnce, lik9, traly, aud, ehrug. Not a single page is error free. If you want to really enjoy the read, get it in another edition.
1330636
LOVE this book, but the Kindle edition is full of scanning errors. Many French words are simply wrong. Be warned. A friend bought this for me, but frankly any ebook for sale should be copyedited and proofread. It's a crime. I still have to buy the paperback if I ever want to know the real words Orwell actually used.
515933
i sent amazon this note:

i'm eager to purchase the kindle edition of the lord of the rings, but apparently there are numerous formatting issues and text dropouts, as has been reported around the net. i downloaded the sample and ran into problems even with that. for instance, at location 300, there is space between N and the rest of Numenorean which causes an incorrect break. at 221-229, "...a romance between Aragorn and E (MISSING TEXT HERE) that Tolkien wrote...". you will agree that it's particularly ironic that these errors occur in forwards describing how there have been problems with the text through the years!

anyway, please let me know when the kindle edition has been corrected, so i can go ahead and purchase it. i'm really looking forward to doing so.

update - 5/28/11
a couple of weeks ago i received an email from amazon informing me that the book had been republished with
corrections. there were instructions for getting a new copy. i checked a couple of problems from the previous
edition and they were fixed!
1709102
very well researched and written old fashioned historical novel , very enjoyable if you don't need explicit sex or violen ce. Sadly the "publishers" appear to have have just digitised an out of copyright print edition without any proof reading, and there is at least one error every few pages.
3747394
Excellent story, particularly the focus on female "magical persons" in contrast to the Harry Potter universe.  So 5 stars to the author, but only one to the publishers, since this edition is desperately in need of proofreading.  (And the same was true of the first book in the series, "Bethany."). Just running the text through spellcheck really doesn't cut it. Really frustrating to keep tripping over things like "too" when "to" is obviously what was meant.  And many other errors.  Really a shame to spoil a very entertaining story.  I very much hope a better job is done with the remaining books in the series.
591368
Five stars have to be reserved for the master of the genre, Patrick O'Brian, but William White has spun a terrific and authentic story which is very well told.  An excellent read except for the almost unbelievably poor editing in the Kindle edition.  I wish I had a penny for each error.  "mem" instead of "them", "mere" instead of "there", hyphens as in "Bain-bridge" or "Mas-tico" caused unfortunate damage to the flow.  If I had been paid a penny for each such error, I suspect I would have collected a buck or two.  Mr. White deserves better.  I'm sorry I didn't buy the paperback.
3719464
This book is GREAT, but the copy I received was badly warped.  I returned it, thinking a replacement copy would be better, but it wasn't, so that got returned too, for a refund.  I'd suggest either getting a hardback or paperback copy, but stay away from the board book version.  It's a wonderful story!
1352974
I love this book, and the entire series.  I had read them a couple times over twenty years ago, and wanted to read them again, so I pulled out my old paperbacks, but they were falling apart with age, so I decided to get the Kindle versions.  I just finished the first two novels, and I was quite surprised to find many spelling and punctuation errors, such as "intinctively" for "instinctively," "Penny" for "Perry," no punctuation after the titles "Mr" and Mrs" and errant capitalizations and misspellings throughout, misplaced indentations, etc.  I actually went back and checked the printed version to see if it could have possibly always been that way but no, the Kindle version just had incredibly shoddy proofreading, which I find odd in this day of computerized spell-check.  Sigh.  I love the Kindle, but this is preposterous treatment of a beautiful, classic work of fiction by a Nobel Prize winning author.
1834217
This is a wonderful story -- I highly recommend it. HOWEVER, beware of the edition published by Kessinger. It is apparently an unedited, unproofread and minimally (if at all) formatted direct printout of the open source copy available on Gutenberg.org. (This was verified by comparing the typos in the two versions. They're identical.) It appears that what this outfit does is downloads/copies/cuts-and-pastes the text file, converts it to a proportional font, and prints it as is. Superficially, the result looks respectable enough, until you start to read the thing. First, there's the book's odd format -- 7 1/2 x 9 1/4 inches -- about the size and shape of, say, your child's math workbook. It's awkward to handle and the simple mechanics of reading becomes an unpleasant chore. The text is properly single spaced, however there's a double space between each paragraph. This brings the eye up short and makes your brain involuntarily expect some sort of climax.

At the end of each PARAGRAPH, mind you.

Imagine a page or two of dialogue.

Talk about interrupting...

...the flow.

In short, this is a very annoying publication, made more so by the fact that there's nothing on the Amazon page or the publisher's web site to indicate the nature of this product. It goes a long way toward spoiling what should be the unalloyed pleasure of this terrific classic mystery. Buy a good used copy instead.
4543787
I read this novel  20 years ago and loved it. Thought I would read it again to see if I felt any differently or if I would get any new insights.  The novel itself was just as engrossing as I had remembered, but, the reading experience was less than optimal.  Misspellings, phrases left out or changed so that the sentences made no sense.
I would definitely recommend the novel , just not this awful edition
2945864
First off, I love this book. I discovered it when I was barely thirteen and have reread it almost a hundred times. It inspired me to read more, write my own stories, and major in English. What I do not like is this edition. Some one is lying. The images provided do not match the book. Maybe it's my edition and if that's the case, then some one needs to give this inferior edition a new ISBN to separate it from the edition with Dor and Blake engravings, if that does exist. Don't get me wrong the artwork is good, the amount detail on the angels and humans is stunning; but of course Satan looks like he was hit in the face with a shovel. Where in the poem did it say Satan's hair is made out of snakes? or that he has horns that look like elbow macaroni? I was expecting illustrations of grandeur and rebellion and instead got these stiff and sorry excuses. Be forewarned, you are in for a let down if you are expecting well known illustrations. While these might have been the illustrations from the first illustrated edition,they are not the best.
2115216
This is one of my all-time favorite novels -- but I lost my old paper copy long ago, and have wanted to re-read it for years. THANKS for giving me the chance to do so without making a trip to the library or bookstore! I'm about to finish it, and have enjoyed no end renewing my old excursions into the dark and gothically gloomy halls of Gormenghast -- and getting re-acquainted with some of the most bizarre, imaginatively developed and memorable characters in all of great literature!
BUT, the only reason I gave it a rating of 4 is that -- being a successful professional writer and editor -- I have noticed several instances of typos, spacing issues, misspellings (yes, I know how the Brits spell many words differently) and even what appear to be a few wrong words. Not having a printed copy at hand for comparison purposes, I can't be sure of the latter. I don't know the technical process & editing methods Amazon uses to convert books to digital format for Kindle -- but somehow, some (though relatively few) mistakes are being made. It's not a big problem -- I'll certainly be ordering other books for my miraculous Kindle (LOVE it!) in the future. Most folks probably won't even notice such fairly minor mistakes. But some of the more literarily erudite souls among your customers will certainly find them at least mildly irksome, as I have -- or, at the other extreme, even to be an outrageous disservice to a great author.