After speaking with Gollum I am posting this thread as a companion to his discussion thread for Sketches of Boz by Charles Dickens. Please go to that thread for discussions: http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/534910-sketches-by-boz-charles-dickens-1833-36-a.html
For those of you who prefer eBooks I have provided a number of links for downloading some different editions of this book; all perfectly legitimate free downloads. Note: only the third link listed here has the illustrations (the original George Cruikshank illustrations) but please read the notes below on that one before downloading it as there are some gotchas.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/882 This is the Gutenberg edition. Well laid out and, as far as I can tell, very well proof read (I found no errors examining several pages). However none of the download formats have any illustrations (I think - I haven't tried all of them).
http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/dickens/boz.pdf This is an edition that Gollum found that is similar to the Gutenberg one but laid out a little differently. Again, this edition appears to be well proofed but, again, has no illustrations.
http://www.archive.org/stream/sketchesbybozill00dickiala#page/n3/mode/2up This is a scan of a 1895 edition complete with George Cruikshank's marvellous illustrations. This can be read online or downloaded but that's where it gets a little more complicated (but not very!
). To download click on the large 'i' icon in the top right of the page. Again I haven't checked all the formats and have made some assumptions:
PDF - this is an 'exact' scan of the book. What I mean by this is it has not been OCR'd (it hasn't been converted to text) it is essentially just a collection of images of each page in the book. As such it does have the illustrations and there are no OCR errors; you are seeing the book exactly as it was printed in 1895 (plus a century odd of wear and tear!). The problem with this one is that it will probably not flow very well on eReaders due to their screen size and it just being a colletions of pictures. It does display well on a larger pc screens and would probably be fine on an iPad for example.
Plain Text - as it says just text so no illustrations. There are a lot of OCR errors. This does not appear to have been well proofed, if at all.
DAISY - I haven't looked at this one but I'm guessing the proofing is the same as the plain text one. I don't know if it has the illustrations (basically I know very little about the DAISY format).
ePub - This has the illustrations and the text has been OCR'd (converted to text). So this has the illustations and the text should flow just fine in your eReader but it has the same lack of proofing. A lot of errors.
Kindle - I haven't looked at this one but I'm guessing it is exactly the same as the ePub edition. IE. has illustrations and text that should flow well on your reader but lots of OCR errors that haven't been proofed.
If I can find the time later (and anyone is interested) I may combine the good Gutenberg text and the illustrations from the third one and hopefully produce an editions with illustrations and good text. I have done this before with Flatland by Edwin E Abbott, which I then passed back to the good people at Gutenberg and is now their download version
Please feel free to ask if you have any queries about downloading these.
For those of you who prefer eBooks I have provided a number of links for downloading some different editions of this book; all perfectly legitimate free downloads. Note: only the third link listed here has the illustrations (the original George Cruikshank illustrations) but please read the notes below on that one before downloading it as there are some gotchas.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/882 This is the Gutenberg edition. Well laid out and, as far as I can tell, very well proof read (I found no errors examining several pages). However none of the download formats have any illustrations (I think - I haven't tried all of them).
http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/dickens/boz.pdf This is an edition that Gollum found that is similar to the Gutenberg one but laid out a little differently. Again, this edition appears to be well proofed but, again, has no illustrations.
http://www.archive.org/stream/sketchesbybozill00dickiala#page/n3/mode/2up This is a scan of a 1895 edition complete with George Cruikshank's marvellous illustrations. This can be read online or downloaded but that's where it gets a little more complicated (but not very!
). To download click on the large 'i' icon in the top right of the page. Again I haven't checked all the formats and have made some assumptions:PDF - this is an 'exact' scan of the book. What I mean by this is it has not been OCR'd (it hasn't been converted to text) it is essentially just a collection of images of each page in the book. As such it does have the illustrations and there are no OCR errors; you are seeing the book exactly as it was printed in 1895 (plus a century odd of wear and tear!). The problem with this one is that it will probably not flow very well on eReaders due to their screen size and it just being a colletions of pictures. It does display well on a larger pc screens and would probably be fine on an iPad for example.
Plain Text - as it says just text so no illustrations. There are a lot of OCR errors. This does not appear to have been well proofed, if at all.
DAISY - I haven't looked at this one but I'm guessing the proofing is the same as the plain text one. I don't know if it has the illustrations (basically I know very little about the DAISY format).
ePub - This has the illustrations and the text has been OCR'd (converted to text). So this has the illustations and the text should flow just fine in your eReader but it has the same lack of proofing. A lot of errors.
Kindle - I haven't looked at this one but I'm guessing it is exactly the same as the ePub edition. IE. has illustrations and text that should flow well on your reader but lots of OCR errors that haven't been proofed.
If I can find the time later (and anyone is interested) I may combine the good Gutenberg text and the illustrations from the third one and hopefully produce an editions with illustrations and good text. I have done this before with Flatland by Edwin E Abbott, which I then passed back to the good people at Gutenberg and is now their download version
Please feel free to ask if you have any queries about downloading these.
