111 of 112 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Check the Publisher carefully before you buy the printed version of "The Notebooks....", September 3, 2010
Amazon associates reviews of a book with different versions of the same book from different publishers. Unfortunately for us customers, Amazon is seeing a growing plague of new Print-On-Demand Publishers who are specialising in reprinting copyright-expired books. Such as "The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci." Some of these publishers produce quite good quality books, some do not.
A classic example of the "not good quality" is the imprint of "The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci" published by General Books LLC.
The version published by General Books LLC is scanned in using OCR technology (and using pretty poor quality OCR scanning equipment and software from the look of their books), is overall of very poor print quality, automated reproduction with no index, no illustrations and an excessive number of typos. Also, there's no illustrations (which are pretty fundamental to any book on or by Leonardo Da Vinci)
To quote a few specifics from the publishers web site:
"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....."
General Books LLC are flooding Amazon with these low quality publications (450,000+ listed under General Books LLC) and, unfortunately, many of them have the reviews associated with the original or with better quality imprints associated with them. The product description is totally misleading for the buyer that's not aware of this publisher. IMHO this is unethical marketing.
A general rule of thumb for these Print on Demand publishers is to take a look at the cover - if it's a good quality illustration that reflects the content, there's a table of contents, and when you do the Look Inside thing there's no disclaimer saying you're looking at another book, and they've used facsimile reproduction technology (rather than OCR), it's usually a pretty safe bet. Conversely, if any of these are missing, you're taking a chance on the quality. I've bought a few based on my selection criteria above and they've been ggod quality. General Books LLC however, is a publisher to steer clear of at all costs.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
161 of 166 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Scholarly, but difficult to read, July 16, 2009
Copious footnotes included within the text overwhelmed this work. I was hoping for the translated notes from Leonardo as he wrote them, with occasional drawings. No drawings are included, although they are described verbally. The notes have been sorted into an order the compiler thought meaningful, but I'd have been happier to see the random thoughts closer to the order Leonardo jotted them down, since to me that would also have provided a glimpse into his thinking patterns. I guess they've been sorted numerous times in the past and perhaps the original order isn't available anymore. Having not read other compilations, I can't say this version is better or worse, but I found it unsatisfying.
It seemed there were more footnotes and explanations within the text than actual notes from Leonardo. It was as though someone found an ancient religious text and instead of just presenting a translated version for personal interpretation, rearranged all the verses and then interjected explanatory notes between every phrase. Since the added notes in this work are in the same text type as Leonardo's words, it's almost impossible to read for his words alone. There is no Table of Contents and perhaps this is just not an ideal work for the eBook format.
While obviously, a tremendous amount of work went into this compilation and there is certainly value to a DaVinci scholar, for someone who just wants to get a flavor of his thoughts and perspectives in his own words, I found it too difficult a read to be rewarding.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
